Aline

In Quebec, Aline Dieu, youngest of fourteen children, is discovered for her voice. The producer Guy-Claude Kamar spends years developing her, has her teeth fixed, teaches her English and makes her a world star. When she grows up, the man she falls in love with is that producer, twenty-six years older. The film is not interested in a music career. It is interested in a life being designed by someone else, and it does not criticise that; it presents it as a love story, and the discomfort comes precisely from that choice. The form is strange: it proceeds like a biography while the names are changed, the tone slides towards comedy and the playing is deliberately exaggerated. Valérie Lemercier directed, wrote and played Aline herself from the age of five into adulthood; in the childhood scenes the fifty-seven-year-old actor's face was digitally placed on a child's body. The film screened at Cannes in 2021 and received a five-minute standing ovation. The story rests on the life of Céline Dion, but the production is unauthorised; Dion took no part and her family objected to it openly. Sylvain Marcel plays the producer. Who it is for: viewers curious about unusual experiments in biography and French comedy. Who it is not for: anyone expecting a film that takes its subject seriously. The digital face in the childhood scenes is frightening to most viewers, and the age gap in the relationship is never questioned.