Aline Is a Biopic Thats Not About Cline Dion, Nope, Not About Her at All - Pura Pura Movie

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Now picture her a little later, late teens, gushing over the man she loves the aforementioned manager without being able to say his name in public, for fear of exactly the kind of scrutiny that this movie seems to be courting. It is well known that there was a 26-year age difference between Dion and her manager and partner Rene Anglil, who died in 2016 of throat cancer. The murky particulars of the origin of that coupling their acquaintance really did begin when Dion was only 12 have tempted many people over the years to backdate that romance, which officially began when the singer was 18 (and despite the objections of her parents).

Aline knows this. Whether it knows that its approach to this material is playing with fire is a separate question. But that indecision, or knowing playfulness, or comedic failure, is what makes the movie such a curious object. It builds discomfort into the movie by way of biography, calling attention to the obvious in a way that makes it plausible as satire until it abandons that idea. Here, Anglil is renamed Guy-Claude Kamar (and played by Sylvain Marcel), and, like in real life, her parents arent feeling it. You can buy that Aline and Guy-Claudes actual life as a couple doesnt start until shes a consenting adult and still wince because the movies fulsome sense of humor, legible as either satirical exaggeration or simply feather-light love story, encourages reaction.

If the idea is to satirize Guy-Claudes interest in Aline, the movie is onto something maybe. Theres a version of what plays out onscreen that could have been ripped from the mind of a man whos deluded himself into thinking Aline was always, to some degree, the goofy, fun-loving not childish, per se adult that Lemercier makes her out to be. (This would deflect from the actual nature of his attraction, but itd at least be an idea.) If the idea is to distract from the thing weve all avoiding talking about, the question weve avoided asking, the movie marvelously fails. Yet even in that failure thered be room to persistently explore the idea. A tightrope is clearly being walked. To what end, becomes the question.

Dion and Anglils love was a genuine love, by all accounts, including those of the couples friends and collaborators. Still there have been questions. In 2019, comedian Katherine Ryan made a joke about the couples age gap that ultimately intended to punch in R. Kellys direction, not Anglils, even as the premise of the joke struck a sense of equivalency between these men. Yet even she would come to temper her gentle elbow to the ribs with apologetic clarification. (I hope people watching the special Cline Dion included . . . understand all of the material comes from a place of reverence, admiration, and love, Ryan said.) What made the joke viable to begin with was the sense that it was really about the irony of questions asked of some, but not of others. And that it had occurred to many of us more than once, even if it remained unspoken.

In Alines case, it very well may have remained unspoken but for the fact that the movie feels, for a long stretch, like its about to go there. Imagine that Lemercier hadnt played 12-year-old Aline, but rather that an actual pre-teen had been there at Kamars side, with another actress playing her further along and so on. That might have made it harder to make this love story pure and simple (but pure most of all). Wed have wound up with something closer to The Tale, Jennifer Foxs 2018 meta-autobiography, starring Laura Dern, in which Fox depicts being groomed by an older man, ingeniously deploying two versions of her younger self to restore a sense of shocking realism to her films recollection. Theres the version of her as she remembers herself, the young woman on the verge of being adult old enough to have agency in this dynamic, in other words, or so she seems to want to think later, as an older woman. And then theres the alternative, that dose of reality: a version of the same events in which our heroines younger self is played by an actress who looks closer to Foxs actual age at that time: a child. For the older Fox, the gap between her conception of her younger self, the willing younger woman, and her actual younger self proves both clarifying and mortifying.

These are different movies with different ends in mind. What unites them is that, in Aline, Lemercier proceeds as if trying to avoid falling into precisely the trap of recognition that The Tale so startlingly impresses upon us. Aline is not a flashback story, like The Tale. It is linear myth-making. Meaning: adulthood happens. Consensual love, expressed with breathless puppy-dog intensity by Aline, happens. And Aline slips so seamlessly into run-of-the-mill hagiography (albeit with lavish, open-armed musical sequences, particularly later on, during Dieus Caesars run) that its intriguingly hard, in retrospect, to pinpoint when it stops being a send-up of the age-gap dilemma and instead slips into the steadier comforts of uncritical appreciation of its subject.

This, too, feels like a product of Lemerciers choice to play Dieu at all ages. The transition from 12 to 18 to thirtysomething is so unburdened by actual attempts to transfigure the movies director and star that were inclined to forget where we started. The long arc of the relationship, starting with Aline and Guy-Claudes above-board, backstage flirtations, is made to feel like it was always a relationship between two adults. It takes so long for the irony of this to catch up to us that by the time one wonders what happened with the films opening conceit, Aline is already old enough to be wary, worn down, overworked. Shes very nearly already a mother. Whether this is what Lemercier intended is for her alone to say. But something feels amiss its like the movie bit off more than it could chew and burped its mouthful of ideas up into a dinner cloth when we werent looking. The feat is only more remarkable for the seeming innocence of Lemerciers performance: Does it really just come down to Lemercier doing a silly bit?

For most of the rest of its runtime, Aline does what biopics have steadily convinced us it is their job to do. It delivers the public triumphs (the record sales, the bigger and bigger concerts) and in-jokes (such as Alines first impression of what we all recognize to be My Heart Will Go On) and private difficulties (conceiving a child), glinting through the bullet points of a celebritys life with all the touch-and-go expediency of a stone sent skipping across water. That much is straightforward.

Yet theres always a tinge of friction. Late in the movie, we see Aline escape the confines the gilded cage of Caesars Palace. Shes at the highest point of her career. She wanders out into the world of Las Vegas as if shes never touched grass, let alone concrete, before. Suddenly were pressed to see what a sheltered life she has lived to this point as if that otherworldly voice of hers were in fact the consequence of her truly being from another world, an alien among us, liberated, even if only for an afternoon. For a moment, the movies inciting gambit seems to rear its head again. Aline comes off like a woman reduced to a childlike lack of experience, which matches the depiction weve seen to this point. A young marriage and a startlingly successful career, a life lived almost entirely in service of her art. Its no wonder there seems to be a chasm between her and the world of mere mortals. Heres to the sacrifices made by our stars.

You can trace the through-line from Alines opening oddities to this late tear in the fabric of its increasingly rote routine. Its a line that, to some, cannot be drawn without Guy-Claude. He is the bubble wrap securing her vacuum-sealed, ecstatically comfortable world. Thats the germ of a more provocative idea. In the worldview of this movie, theres no room for it: There is no such thing as love conquered by provocation. And theres diminishing room for skepticism. Laugh it off. Leave it behind. I would hate to ever make Cline Dion mad, comedian Katherine Ryan was pushed to confess. She apparently isnt alone.