'Aline' Trailer: This Unofficial Céline Dion Biopic Can Use Her Songs But Not Her Name
Meet young Céline Dion. Or, actually, meet Aline Dieu. She's a musical prodigy with the voice of a songbird, who was plucked out of obscurity from her hometown of Quebec, Canada, and goes on to become an international superstar. It's a story that will sound familiar to fans of Canadian songstress Céline Dion, with a soundtrack that will sound even more familiar — it's full of some of Dion's most beloved and famous songs. But the musical romance Aline is about some woman named...Aline.
Yes, that's right, this is an unofficial Célion Dion biopic that can't use the singer's real name, but for some reason, can use her real songs? Before your head explodes, watch the Aline trailer below.
Aline Trailer
UniFrance released the trailer for Aline back in October 2020, but it didn't gain much traction until this month, when it was announced that Aline would be playing out of competition at the Cannes Film Festival. And that's no surprise for splashy biopics about well-loved musicians, as films like Judy premiered at Telluride in 2019 and earned star Renée Zellwegger an Oscar, while Bohemian Rhapsody was a controversial Oscar darling. But bizarrely, Aline isn't really a music biopic, even though it has all the trappings and the songs of one. Because it's an unofficial film "inspired" by Céline Dion's life.
What's breaking our brains — and I'm sure yours too — is that it uses Dion's music. Usually films that are loosely inspired by an artist's life can't license their music because of complicated copyright issues, like Todd Haynes' Velvet Goldmine, which was a David Bowie biopic, sans the famous music. If Dion's team allowed Aline permission to use her music, why not her name too?
Whatever the case, Aline is clearly a passion project for Valérie Lemercier, who writes, directs, and stars as the title character. Perhaps it's Lemercier's way of living out the romance between Dion and the equivalent of her much-older manager and husband René Angélil, to whom she was married for 22 years until his death in 2016. The film appears to make their love story central to the movie, painting it like some grand old romance. We'll have to see if that will win over any of the audience at Cannes.
Here is the synopsis for Aline:
Quebec, late 1960s, Sylvette and Anglomard welcome their 14th child: Aline. In the Dieu family, music reigns supreme and when Aline grows up we discover a gift to her, she has a golden voice. When he hears that voice, music producer Guy-Claude has just one thing in mind ... to make Aline the greatest singer in the world. Supported by her family and guided by the experience and then the budding love of Guy-Claude, they will together write the pages of an extraordinary destiny.