Dalida

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.

With her powerful performances and dramatic emotional investment to her singing, unmatched even today, Egyptian born singer and actress, named by her Italian parents Yolanda Cristina Gigliotti, better known as Dalida, undoubtedly holds a unique place in the history of European and wider--including Middle East, Russia, Japan, Canada--popular music.

By the time I reached my teens (in early 1970's) a middle-aged gentleman from the neighbourhood has already accrued a good collection of Dalida's records, and that's how I was introduced to her singing, and remained her fan ever since, for four and half decades already. Contributive to that is the circumstance that last ten years I've been living and working in Lebanon, with Dalida's strong presence in its musical scene, and with her faithful audience, very much alive even three decades after her untimely demise.

That's why I have been very enthusiastic to see the movie based on her life, but also a bit concerned about it. Now that the movie is out and I have seen it, I'm very pleased to say that it has met my expectations to the greatest extent.

A number of elements are greatly contributing to the solid success and good quality of the French produced biopic, simply titled "Dalida" (2016). Based on my earlier findings and details known, story follows Dalida's life meticulously and faithfully, life filled with professional successes and personal torments and unhappiness. Actors have done an extraordinary job, which is especially important in the case of the leading actress, Sveva Alviti, who has brought to screen the title character--portrayed at the right measure, faithfully, decently and respectfully--but also actors impersonating key players in Dalida's life, her brothers (the younger one, Bruno-Orlando, plausibly depicted by Riccardo Scamarcio, performing as her career manager since 1966) as well as her professional companions, and partners in her private life. Finally, identification achieved thanks to the fascinating physical resemblance of the leading actress, as well as her successfully accomplished impression of Dalida's on-stage (and otherwise) presence and mannerisms, is certainly not disadvantageous.

According to her biographers, Dalida performed and recorded in more than ten different languages, while being fluent in at least half of that number. However, due to the fact that her career has shot to stardom in France, and her success has been most persistently maintained across the French-speaking music scene, lyrics of her songs are mainly in French. Therefore, to me, a non-French speaker, her songs were appealing primarily because of the power of her performance, ranging between its modest intimacy and dramatic intensity. Henceforth, only after watching this movie subtitled in English I have realized how much lyrics used in her songs were matching the on-goings in her own life. As if song makers and lyricist were retelling her life in real time. Having her screenplay based on the book written by Dalida's already mentioned brother Orlando, and thanks to proper choice of such songs with real life-relating lyrics, and their excellent timing, screenplay writer and director, Ms. Lisa Azuelos, has offered to the viewers most dramatic and suggestive revelations, easily implying such exciting, and--within the context of Dalida's private life troubled by failed relationships and personal difficulties, mishaps and tragedies--often touching connections between the songs and reality.

Though shot as biography feature film (biopic), meant primarily to entertain, then to inform, by appearing so well connected to reality, true to the facts, naturally gaining from the circumstance that the main actress is almost a dead ringer for Dalida, further inspired by clearly Dalida's own voice performing all included songs, it almost feels like watching a biography documentary.

To Dalida's faithful long-time followers, this is a great chance to reconfirm their fandom, to all others--including a co-spectator at the movie screening I attended, my wife Minnie--an excellent opportunity to get acquainted to this most gifted, duly celebrated singer, whose life was tragically cut short, but whose legacy, primarily her songs (but also, her high ranking as a personality, e.g. personality who had the greatest impact on French society), still lives and remains for posterity, as a pleasant reminder of her impressive and memorable talents.

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 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.

It's really great! I gave it 10 points. It was really nice to know Dalida. Filmin is completely music-filled and the selection of appropriate songs was good. Player selections and acting were also very nice. I love the fact that Dalida is singing things that I do not know about. REALLY LEGEND! They also look very same with Edith Piaf. I learned in the film that they are competitors. The lead role was very good. The story was fun and the camera was beautiful too. The characters were beautiful. The final scene was pretty good too. It's a really professional job. They were able to legend the legend in front of the camera. I wanted it to be longer.