Film Review
After Édith Piaf (
La Môme)
and Claude François (
Cloclo),
another French cultural icon - Dalida - finally gets to have her tragic existence
laid open for public consumption in this predictably flamboyant biopic.
The helmer of the hit comedy
LOL (2008), Lisa Azuelos's main (perhaps
only?) qualification to direct this film is that she herself comes from a
musical family, her mother being the actress-singer Marie Laforêt,
a contemporary of Dalida. Azuelos certainly has fun dwelling on the
grimmer aspects of her subject's tortured life, showing an almost unseemly
fascination with the multiple suicides that provide the film's most sensational
moments, but is far less successful in getting to the woman beneath the myth
and showing us exactly who she was.
Dalida makes the easy mistake
that practically all biopics succumb to, namely to become so fixated on the
subject's public image that we never get to catch so much as a glimpse of
the real person beneath. The fact that the film was produced by Dalida's
brother, Orlando, may possibly have had something to do with this.
Azuelos's direction is assured but frustrating pedestrian. All that the film
offers is a seemingly endless succession of video clips and a doggedly chronological
account of the singer's life from cradle to grave. The challenge of
cramming thirty incredibly full professional years into two hours of screen
time is not one that any sane screenwriter would relish, so it's hardly a
surprise that what Azuelos gives us is the sketchiest kind of biography,
one that covers all the salient points but has scarcely any depth to it.
Thankfully, the performances are so solid and convincing that the lack of
narrative substance scarcely registers - providing you are not inclined to
go back and watch the film a second time (something that some Dalida fans
will no doubt find hard to resist).
Playing the lady herself is the stunning Italian actress Sveva Alviti who,
thanks to a remarkable make-up job and her own striking resemblance to the
singer, could easily be mistaken for the original. Watching Alviti
perform Dalida's familiar hit songs, with lip-synching to the original recordings
so good that it is virtually impossible to fault, is a truly eerie experience,
one that is guaranteed to send a frisson down your spine. Alviti's mesmeric
performance in this film virtually guarantees her international stardom,
but it is worth recognising that she receives tremendous support from her
talented co-stars - Jean-Paul Rouve, Nicolas Duvauchelle, Niels Schneider
and Ricardo Scamarcio are all excellent.
More than anything, it is the quality of the acting that makes the film so
captivating and poignant. The mundane script does it no favours and
Azuelos's workmanlike direction is mostly to blame for the film not being
anything like as powerful as it should have been, given the remarkable story
it has to tell. A lack of inspiration on the writing and directing
fronts, together with a reluctance to probe more deeply and show us Dalida's
true face, are what prevent this from being anything more than a somewhat
empty crowdpleaser. It will take far more than a banal biopic like
this to rob Dalida of her mystique.
© James Travers 2017
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.
Film Synopsis
Dalida was the name that Yolanda Cristina Gigliotti adopted when she began
appearing in movies in the mid-1950s. Then the seductive Egyptian was
barely into her twenties and could have had no idea of the glittering career
that was just over the horizon. By the mid-1960s she was to become
one of the biggest pop stars of her generation, and within a decade she would
become a living legend, her songs known throughout the world. But behind
the public image there was a fragile and insecure woman who suffered because
of her success. Most of the men who entered her life left her in the
most cruel and dramatic way possible, and having lived through this seemingly
endless succession of personal tragedies she finally knew that she could
not go on...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.