Valrie Lemercier, protagonist and author: ironic style without celebrations and previously unthinkable tricks of morphing technology
A biopic? More, much more, practically a squared biopic, indeed to the cube. Aline – The voice of love a bet with the spectator’s intelligence and together with the possibilities of cinema, a journey into the myth of one of the most famous singers in the world and at the same time an opportunity to distance himself, with irony and at the same time with admiration. In a plot that does not need to measure itself against the truth, because (stealing words from Fellini and Pinelli) she too can say what I invented is all true.
She Valrie Lemercier, multifaceted French show-woman, actress (made her debut with Louis Malle in Nice in May and won two Csar), screenwriter, director (six films, the last this one), singer, humorist. Instead one of the most famous singers in the world Cline Dion which for she is never called by name in the film: the protagonist is called Aline Dieu but it doesn’t take long to understand whose kind of light-hearted avatar. Throughout the film, obvious allusions are sown (the song Good Lord’s voice, guiding title of the album that launches it, becomes on the cover The voice du Bon Dion) and many episodes of his life that have become famous are explicitly mentioned (such as the fact that for his first audition he used a pencil – in the film it becomes a fountain pen – as a microphone), without forgetting the stages of his career, from Eurovision Song Contest up to the Oscar for the song by Titanic. But these are not the pillars on which the film is based, rather Lemercier (who signs the screenplay with Brigitte Buc) enjoys twisting the stages of a life that seems to have come out of a photo novel in a pop key. Starting with its origins quebcois and the language he hears spoken in the family (one of the reasons why it is really worth seeing the film in the original language with subtitles).
Aline / Cline was therefore born into a Quebec family, the youngest of fourteen children, all more or less with the disease of music, starting with her mother Sylvette (Danielle Fichaud) and her father Anglomar (Roc Lafortune). The two immediately understand the extraordinary vocal skills of their new born and the elder brother Jean-Bobin (Antoine Vzina) is in charge of sending a demonstration cassette to agent Guy Kamar (Sylvain Marcel), who takes very little to understand what rough diamond has in hands. And so the twelve-year-old Aline begins to climb the steps of success, first at home and then also abroad, always with the face of Valrie Lemercier (and with the extraordinary musicality of Victoria Sio).
The technique
morphing
now it allows tricks up to a very short time ago unthinkable and so the face of the actress put (rejuvenated) first on the body of a teenager then on that of a very young girl to let Aline become an adult fully interpreted by Lemercier, with an effect that goes beyond the simple identification game (and that the morphing makes it possible). There is something in this trans-chronological bet that seems to underline on the one hand the destiny to be already present from the earliest age (since the aspect is already that, more or less, of adulthood) but on the other hand also a way to describe its monstrosity, its being immediately a kind of walking monument (to itself).
The tone, always light-hearted, cheerfully provocative, wisely ironic. And precisely here lies the key capable of transforming a film at risk of celebration or, worse, desecration into a (won) bet on the possibilities of a radical-popular cinema. Whenever the story is taking a serious turn (family as a shield, love for agent Kamar, success, life as a super-rich) here is that the film brings out a good dose of irony (the popularity in the Vatican , the disorientation in the too many rooms of his new villa, the negative judgment upon first listening to My Heart Will Go On), bringing the operation back to the tracks that are most congenial to him: those of a funny (and a little kitschy) comedy that every now and then wants to resemble a biopic.
January 18, 2022 (change January 18, 2022 | 19:44)
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