While she has just canceled her tour for health reasons, Celine Dion plays her own role in Love Again, a little, a lot, passionately. In this romantic comedy, the interpreter of My Heart Will Go On finds himself playing matchmaker between a jaded journalist and a bereaved illustrator. Mira (Priyanka Chopra-Jonas) lost her fiancé in a traffic accident. Inconsolable, she continues to send text messages to the deceased’s mobile detailing his feelings. She is unaware that the number has been reassigned to music critic Rob (Sam Heughan). Charmed by Mira’s prose and encouraged by Céline Dion, whom he met in an interview, he decided to meet the designer in the flesh.
“With rose water, this romance is a tender, sparkling and comforting candy,” says Closer. An opinion corroborated by our colleagues from Parisian who evoke a comedy “candy pink certainly unrealistic, but which puts balm in the heart and does good”. More bitter Le Figaro nevertheless salutes the singer’s performance: “From the script to the soundtrack – including five unreleased titles, there is not much to save from this melodrama without tone. Except, maybe the star singer’s self-mockery number. The Quebecer even steals the show from the lovebirds, whose idyll, sewn with white thread, leaves the hearts of the spectators in a flat encephalogram.
Télé 7 Jours abounds in this direction: “The presence on the screen of the Quebec star is by far the most successful thing in this bluette”, considers the magazine. CNews does not say anything else: “If we leave the screening with a furious desire to resume all the hits of the Quebecer, on the other hand, we will quickly forget this feature film whose plot is as predictable as it is agreed”. On the side of the JDD, the weekly praises the performances of Priyanka Chopra-Jonas and Sam Heughan struggling in a comedy unfolding a series of “cliches” but which “works despite everything by the exaltation of the feelings completely assumed by the tormented characters, the ‘one by mourning, the other by loneliness.
Much harsher, the critics of Liberation and Première did not attribute any quality to the film. For everyday life, the romantic comedy looks “aesthetically like a soap from the Disney channel, a mix between Un si grand soleil and Plus belle la vie. The subject is not far from this telegeny, with the same nullities and the same discoveries and curiosities”. As for the specialized magazine, it sees “in reality only a subterfuge which hides between its lines the real subject of the film: Celine Dion, in her own role. The superstar comes into the story like a hair in the soup: we don’t know what she’s doing there, but one thing is for sure, she’s having a blast.” For our colleague from Télérama, all the good he thinks of the film is in the title of his article: “Love Again: a little, a lot, passionately, a romcom with Celine Dion that does not seduce us at all.”
