Aline

I watched Aline while eating a bowl of cold cereal because I’d forgotten to go grocery shopping, and the rhythmic crunching of generic cornflakes provided a weirdly percussive backbeat to the soaring power ballads. It was a fittingly mundane way to consume a film that is anything but.

If you’ve spent any time on the weirder corners of Film Twitter or Letterboxd over the last couple of years, you’ve likely seen the screenshots. There is a small child—supposedly five years old—sitting at a dinner table. But the face isn't that of a child; it is the unmistakably adult face of French comedy royalty Valérie Lemercier, digitally shrunk and pasted onto a tiny body. It looks like a glitch in the Matrix or a deleted scene from a Cronenberg body-horror flick. But here is the secret: Aline isn't a joke. It is a sprawling, earnest, and deeply moving piece of hyper-fixated fan-fiction that manages to be the best musical biopic of the decade precisely because it is so profoundly strange.

The Uncanny Valley of the Heart

Directed by and starring Valérie Lemercier, Aline is a "fictionalized" account of the life of Céline Dion. Here, she is Aline Dieu (Aline "God," for those keeping track of the metaphors), the 14th child of a musically gifted family in Quebec. We follow her from her first steps to her global superstardom, her Eurovision win, and her controversial, soul-deep romance with her much older manager, Guy-Claude (a stand-in for René Angélil, played with immense warmth by Sylvain Marcel).

The decision for Lemercier to play Aline at every single age—from toddler to grandmother—is the film’s biggest hurdle and its greatest strength. In an era where big-budget Disney flicks use de-aging technology to make actors look like smooth-skinned plastic dolls, Lemercier opts for something much more theatrical and jarring. It’s a choice that forces you to engage with the essence of the character rather than the literal reality. Once you get past the initial shock of seeing a 50-something woman in a schoolgirl outfit, you realize that Aline is the only musical biopic that isn't afraid to look absolutely ridiculous in pursuit of the truth. It captures the awkwardness of being a prodigy better than any prosthetic nose ever could.

A Dieu-Sized Ambition

While the visual choices lean toward the comedic, the emotional core is pure drama. This is a family story through and through. Danielle Fichaud is a revelation as Sylvette Dieu (the Mama Dion figure). She anchors the film, providing the necessary grit to balance out the glitter of the Las Vegas stages. The chemistry between Lemercier and Sylvain Marcel is genuinely touching, navigating the "he met her when she was twelve" aspect of their history with a surprising amount of grace and sincerity. They don't shy away from the power dynamics, but they frame it as a singular, fated bond.

The film feels remarkably contemporary in its pacing, skipping through the decades with the frantic energy of a TikTok montage before slowing down for the moments that actually matter. It avoids the "and then I wrote this hit" fatigue that plagued films like Bohemian Rhapsody. Instead, it focuses on the loneliness of the pedestal. There’s a sequence involving Aline wandering through her cavernous mansion, unable to even go out for a slice of pizza without an international incident, that feels like a pointed commentary on our modern celebrity-obsessed culture. In an age of parasocial relationships, Aline feels like the ultimate fan's response—a movie that wants to protect its subject as much as it wants to celebrate her.

The Power of Sincere Parody

It is a shame that Aline largely vanished after its 2021 release, falling into the "obscure curiosity" bucket for English-speaking audiences. It was caught in that awkward pandemic-era distribution limbo where unless you were a superhero or a legacy sequel, you were basically sent to live on a farm (streaming) where nobody could find you. But this film deserves a cult following. It’s a French production about a French-Canadian icon that feels like it was made on another planet.

The music, performed not by Dion but by the incredible Victoria Sio, is spectacular. Every time the film threatens to become too weird, a musical number kicks in to remind you why we care about this woman in the first place. If you can't handle a middle-aged woman in a bowl cut playing a schoolgirl, you don't deserve the emotional payoff of the final act. By the time Aline is singing "Ordinaire" at the end of the film, the visual gimmicks have faded away, leaving only a raw, bruised portrait of a woman who gave her entire life to her voice.

Aline is a magnificent oddity that succeeds because it commits 100% to its own absurdity. It’s a film that shouldn’t work—a biopic that changes the names but keeps the soul, starring a woman who refuses to let a little thing like "linear aging" get in the way of a great performance. It’s funny, it’s heartbreaking, and it’s unapologetically loud. Seek it out on whatever streaming platform it’s currently hiding on; your eyes will be confused, but your heart will be full.