Dalida (2017)
Directed by Lisa Azuelos

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.

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...