Dalida

I went to see this with my wife (I'm American, she is French) primarily in order to please her and thinking that this would be a weepy, melodramatic biopic of interest only to hard-core fans of the late Dalida.

Guess what? I actually found it to be a quite enjoyable film, of obvious particular interest to those who know about the portrayed singer's huge professional success (she is relatively unknown in the US and the UK but was a tremendous star throughout Europe, the Middle East and Japan) shadowed by an enormous amount of personal tragedy in her life, but pretty damn good all on its own as well.

The actress who portrays Dalida is a dead ringer for her and even though it is obvious that she is lip-syncing the songs, her ability to imitate Dalida's gestures, both on and off stage, is stunning. The supporting case also does a very good job and the director carefully stays within the boundaries of what could have otherwise been a Hollywood tear-jerker type film, never descending into pure melodrama.

If you don't know about Dalida, this film is worth a look -- if you do know about her, you should definitely see it.

Her early life in Egypt was totally dropped from the movie although she lived in Cairo for almost 21 years.

And HOW COULD THEY MISS ONE OF HER MOST ICONIC SONGS FOR THE EGYPTIANS AND ARABS "Helwa Ya Baldi".

This movie would have been much better.

I really enjoyed watching this movie since I'm a huge fan of Dalida and her music so I really wanted to learn more about her life story through a biographical film like this one. This film however seems to fall short in several aspects, and I will try to list them all here with further explanation.

First of all, the film spends too much time using flashbacks going between the present, the past, and then to the present/future again, which creates a lot of confusion and makes you wonder, what point in time are we in exactly? Which events happened first? Are we now watching Dalida in the present or the past or something else? Flashbacks can be a great way to tell different parts of a story, but using them in excess like in this film and in such a disorganized way really just brings down the level of enjoyment of watching the film. Considering the film is about 2 hours long, the first 40 minutes or so of the film involved almost non-stop flashbacks between Dalida's attempt of suicide to her past relationship with Luigi Tenco, to her childhood, back to her psychiatrist's office, and back to different events. What is the director's point of view in all this? It just creates confusion and doesn't serve the movie well in my opinion.

The second point is the choice of cast. Anyone who knows the real Dalida knows that she had a real presence and physical beauty that showed off on and off her stage. The actress who played Dalida did not have any physical resemblance to her and I was not convinced for one moment that I am watching Dalida. It just feels like I'm watching someone "pretending" to be Dalida, almost like an old MTV program where an ordinary person dresses and gets a chance to look like a famous celebrity for one whole day. I can't remember the name of this program now. Dalida for sure did not have such huge mouth with flawed teeth like the actress who played her in the movie, and her eyes were not the same. Her whole face in fact has no physical resemblance. Not much effort was made with makeup to even make her look like Dalida. They changed her hair styles a few times to match Dalida's different styles through different periods of her life and made her wear the same dresses and clothes. That was it! Considering that we were supposedly watching her life story from 1956-1987, I didn't see her face age one bit through almost 30 years of her life. Was she immortal? Not a single wrinkle in her face, eye bags, receding hair line, all makes you wonder if this was just a low-budget production.

Third: the sex scenes. I really don't understand what is the point of adding so many sex scenes almost with every lover that Dalida was involved in. Is this an erotic movie or an autobiographical drama about the life of a celebrity? I'm not even sure if some of them were factual considering that it is very hard to know such intimate details about a celebrity like what she was doing in bed and with whom.

Fourth: Anyone who knows the life story of Dalida knows that she spent the first 22 years of her life in Cairo, Egypt (her birth country). Yet, we only saw Dalida's life in Egypt for barely a few minutes as an infant and as a child with her family. What about her adolescence and her life as an adult woman? In reality, Dalida was a rising star and well known person in Egypt thanks to winning the Miss Egypt beauty pageant in 1954, and participating in several films including her main role in the Arabic film Sigara we Kass (A Cigarette and a Glass) by the Egyptian director Niazi Mostafa also in 1954. Why were all these details omitted from the movie?

To make it even worse, we did not even see the development in her rise to fame in France-only just a very brief instant of how she was invited by Lucien Morisse to sign a contract for his music label. We didn't really see or understand how she left her family and entire life in Egypt, and how she arrived in France initially, or even how she decided to start a life as a singer, considering that she was previously an actress in Egypt.

Fifth: The music and Dalida's songs in the film. Simply there are too many songs in the film, which don't really serve the plot well. Yes some of them have lyrics which relate to that moment in her life and tell us how she feels or what is going on, but this also makes it difficult to understand the background behind these songs as we often see her singing a song with different events or things going on in her life quite quickly at the same time that the song is playing and without going into enough detail. This also leads me to ask: Is this a drama or a musical? Playing too many songs in the film while watching other events unfold at the same time just makes it shallow and lacking any depth that is important to understand the drama in her life.

Overall, an enjoyable film to watch, although it is quite shallow with many events unfolding very quickly and many others entirely omitted from the plot like the first 21 years of her life in Egypt.

I remember Dalida's songs from my childhood. This film is a good biopic and worth to watch to learn about her more.

At first, I found it a little bit too tragic as a film but at the end her real life is unfortunately tragic. The music was obviously great. Sveva Alviti and Riccardo Scamarcio who act as Dalida and her brother/manager Orlando was great.

I wish, I would find more than Dalida's love affairs in the film such as; her dreams, her motives, her relationship with the music.

As a result, I can recommend the film to learn more about one of the best female singers in history and also it was a nice film to watch.

Beautifully written and portrayed journey through Dalida's success- filled career and through her rather melancholic personal life.

Sveva shines as Dalida - she does her justice, and with all the right emotions at that. The picture offers a beautifully written and directed insight into the life of the legend that is Dalida. The transition between different phases of her life is light and allows you to dig deeper into what drove her success and ultimately her fall.

While the film could've done better with Sveva's lip-syncing, the music is carefully selected, introduced, and fills the theater with Dalida's warm and unique voice.

Probably will not be as commercially successful as the contextually similar La Vie en Rose with Marion Cottilard but insightful and beautiful nonetheless. Highly recommended.