Dalida (2016)
(On Cable TV, September 2022) While most musical biopics follow a certain format, that format usually remains (Hollywood sarcasm aside) shaped by the true history it’s trying to tell. Most acclaimed musicians can actually look back on a dark, dramatic period, but they usually pull through. 1950s-60s French singing sensation Dalida, unfortunately, had a horrifying personal life alongside her musical career, and biopic Dalida certainly hews close to the sad facts of her life. As singers go, Dalida still remains a unique figure—not so much for some great songs, but for a career that spanned multiple languages, a beauty that owed much to her Italian parents and a cosmopolitan outlook inherent in a life that began in Cairo, blossomed in Paris and took her all around the world at a time when the jet-set was becoming a thing. But as the film insists, her romantic life was in shambles from beginning to end, with multiple affairs, an unsuccessful marriage, suiciding friends and partners (four of them), an abortion making her sterile, a suicide attempt in 1967 and a self-inflicted death in 1987. So, there’s a lot of drama in-between renditions of classic songs (I remain impressed how many tunes are still familiar, decades after the end of her stardom) and some mildly effective historical recreations. Sveva Alviti had a tough assignment in trying to incarnate Dalida, and she doesn’t do too badly. And while the film does a fine job at presenting the multiple facets of its subject’s life, there’s a point at which the accumulation of misery (on which the film focuses, rather than the musical success) becomes almost too much. Still, Dalida is a good reminder for the younger generations of what a great performer she was at her prime, and the incredible challenges she faced throughout her life—and if you want more, have a look at the rest of her biography for even more misery that the film was too short to contain.