The moment:
“Aline” stands below the stage where her family sings. She is the 14th child, decades younger than her siblings. They sing, grinning down at her occasionally, and she peeks up beneath the stage, eyes glimmering with what is probably supposed to be happiness and also foreshadowing. This little pipsqueak is going to be bigger than all of her siblings one day, and she already knows it! Okay, fair enough, pretty standard, in terms of biopics. But what makes this moment so jarring and downright weird is that the 56-year-old airbrushed face of Valérie Lemercier, the star (and director) of “Aline,” has been awkwardly superimposed on the child’s body. “Awkwardly” is an understatement. The overall effect is so creepy it breaks the fabric of not just the film, but reality itself. My soul rejected what I was seeing. My response was: What in the Uncanny Valley is going on here?
This “device” continues through “Aline”‘s early sequences showing Aline’s rise as a child singing phenom. Either Lemercier’s face has been digitally superimposed, or she has digitally shrunk her own body so she appears to be a child surrounded by adults. When she’s sitting at the dinner table surrounded by her huge family, the effect is so strange it’s almost distressing. There is an Uncanny Valley sitting at the table and nobody bats an eye.
The film opens with the following statement: “This film is inspired by the life of Celine Dion. It is, however, a work of fiction.” The “however” is pretty shady! One wonders what Dion might think of all of this. Valérie Lemercier has directed vehicles for herself before, and she is obviously an enormous Celine Dion fan. Is she so much of a fan that she couldn’t bear to hire a child actress to play child Celine? She needed to embody six-year-old Celine as well?
Aline is born to elderly working-class parents, and it’s a very close family, held together by the stern and generous mama Sylvette (Danielle Fichaud). One of Aline’s older brothers has connections in the music business, and sends a tape of his 12-year-old sister to a record producer named Guy-Claude Kamar (Sylvain Marcel), obviously a stand-in for René Angélil, who was Dion’s manager and eventual husband. Dion’s marriage to Angélil made headlines at the time. There was the age difference, yes, but the fact that he had managed her since she was a child generated even more gossip. The romantic scenes between Marcel and Lemercier are awkward, to say the very least, but at least by this point in the film Lemercier is actually a normal-sized human with her own head!