She
was part Édith Piaf, part Juliette Gréco, part disco diva, and part black
widow. Under her stage name, the French-naturalized Egyptian-Italian Iolanda
Cristina Gigliotti, a.k.a. Dalida, became one of the top-selling recording
artists in European history, but her personal life was relentlessly tragic. Lisa
Azuelos, the daughter her Gigliotti’s contemporary, Marie Laforêt, gives her subject
the glossy and gossipy big-screen bio-treatment in Dalida (trailer
here), which screens as part of Laemmle’s
Culture Vulture series this Monday and Tuesday.
For
the Gigliottis, music was the family business. Her beloved father was first
violinist at the Cairo Opera, until he was warped and broken by his time in an
Allied internment camp. Immigrating to France to pursue some kind of show
business career, Dalida won a fateful radio talent contest in front of the
network director, Lucien Morisse, and legendary record executive Eddie Barclay.
Both men would play instrumental roles guiding her early career. Morisse also
married her, but it would be a short-lived union.
Dalida the film opens in
media res, following her first, unsuccessful attempt to take her own life,
following the suicide of her younger Italian lover. He will not be the last man
in her life to opt for his final out-chorus. In fact, the darkly poetic notion
that Dalida and death were constant companions is a recurring motif throughout
the film. You might think she had met her match when she started a romance with
Richard Chanfray, a magician and TV personality, who claimed to be the
700-year-old Count de Saint-Germain, but don’t count on it.
Sveva
Alviti is a strong likeness of Dalida and she manages to project class and
dignity amid all the lurid melodrama. It is actually a very physical
performance, with her looking frightfully skinny during the singer’s regular
bouts of anorexia. Many of the music tracks actually feature the subject
herself, but Alviti still has considerable stage presence and dance moves.
Reportedly,
Morisse’s daughter has taken issue with the way Azuelos and her co-screenwriter
Orlando (Dalida’s brother) depicted her father, but Jean-Paul Rouve’s
performance is rather complex and forgivingly human. For what it’s worth, as
Barclay, Vincent Perez hardly looks like himself, but it is definitely a
larkier role to play.
