Photo: Amazon MGM Studios
Yes, she felt it during her first Vegas residency, the one that started in 2003. And the one that followed. And during the 2008 world tour, the next tour and all the other tours that followed. As Celine Dion remembers in I am: Celine Dion — a documentary that obscures his intellectual life while revealing his physical life — her voice was the first part of her to register symptoms of a rare neurological disorder called stiff-person syndrome. Normally, after a show, her voice would drop at least half a note. One day, she noticed her voice was rising instead. Then it started to fade. Sometimes, she would buy time on stage by turning the microphone toward the crowd and asking them to sing, an act of desperation disguised as generosity. She kept performing, kept belting and swiveling her hips and kicking a leg like a lanky French-Canadian Elvis. She survived the pain for 17 years, as her voice failed, her muscles rebelled and her spasms turned into convulsions. “In 2020,” she tells the camera, “I could barely walk.”
I first saw the film, which debuted on Amazon Prime Video this week, at its premiere at Lincoln Center. The room was packed with journalists and fans singing along to the hits that were playing before the screening. Some wore suits and dresses; others wore tour T-shirts; one guy, with an extra yoke, wore a racerback tank top with a photo of Céline covered entirely in sequins on the front. It was the most excited crowd possible for a heroic comeback, and when the 56-year-old star herself took the stage in cream silk to introduce the film, everyone stood up and cheered. To be fair, she looked great—and her presence was reassuring: If she were here in person, how badly off could she really be?
I am: Celine Dion lets you decide. Without ever really questioning the accepted model of the documentary approved by the stars and shaped by the publicists — directed by Irène Taylor and co-produced by Celine’s company, Les Productions Feeling – the film falls somewhere between hand-holding fan service and a brutal portrait of chronic illness. Céline is one of the rare living singers whose work is so omnipresent that it textures the nostalgia of the world. But this film suggests a new status to her: that of an injured athlete.
It’s not just her way of speaking. Like many athletes, Dion doesn’t have much to say to her audience about why she does what she does or how she does it. (And you won’t hear it from anyone else; she and her twins are the only people who speak directly to the camera.) Of her support group, she says, “All we wanted to do was be the best each of us could be.” Of teamwork in general, she says, “If you want to go fast, go alone. And if you want to go far, go together.” Of herself, she says, “The person I am today, I didn’t create myself. I didn’t invent myself.” I am.” Even now, she tends to break into song mid-sentence. She won’t say what she likes about the music she’s recorded — she’s admitted in the past that she once hated “My Heart Will Go On” — but she will say the choice of song didn’t very important to her. According to her, “the performance is much bigger than the song”.
Taylor, the film’s director, doubles down on this point of view. I am: Celine Dion is full of concert footage, inviting us to appreciate its grandeur through its enormous physical. While we get to see clips from past studio sessions, in which Celine stands still as ballads pour out of her like a freight train, we spend more time watching her onstage, letting loose as she races toward a crescendo. The stomp and swirl of those long gazelle legs, that outstretched wingspan that seemed as wide as the stadium. (I had always thought of Celine as one of the iconic tall girls. I was shocked to learn that we would be the same height: 5’7″.) Taylor wants us to know that Before Céline fell ill, the woman was never without control of her entire body. From the 80s to the 2000s, she’s there, sprinting, jumping, walking tall, pointing, spinning. We see her stretching and rehearsing in dancer’s attire before a show, practicing alone or with her backup performers. We see her bouncing around a stage dressed in black leather so she can stand in front of her guitarist, thrust her hips, tickle her air guitar, and mimic the sound of her instrument with her voice. Sometimes this vocal is played as a teasing prelude to the full 360° singing and dancing experience. In a concert clip, she begins her hit “The Power of Love” shrouded in darkness, her voice echoing from a Céline-shaped hole: “I cling to your body / And I feel every movement that you do…” When she gets to “‘Cause I’m your lady…” the lights turn on to reveal her in gold glitter, pointing straight at you: “And you’re my man. »
The power of the concert scenes is immediately juxtaposed with a more recent cell phone video of Céline lying on the ground, paralyzed by a seizure. She groans in pain as paramedics lift her onto a stretcher. This raw clip illustrates the film’s revelations, all of which concern Céline’s physical state. (If you’re hoping to learn more about her relationship with her late husband, René Angélil, who discovered her when she was 12 and married when she was 26, you’ll be disappointed; everything she’ll say , is that he was “the love of my life.”) At the beginning of the film, Céline says that she has not sung in two years because the disease restricts the muscles in her chest. We can see her trying, and it’s painful. As she works on recording a new song, she strives to hit notes that one would expect her to perform quickly. After one attempt, she was so overstimulated that she had a seizure during a sports therapy session. His feet twitch, then his hands. She goes from lucidity to having an epileptic seizure, her face a mask of fear and pain – and the camera keeps rolling. Her team is there, caring for her and administering medication, but she still has to struggle until the end, when she stands up, wrapped in a blanket, humiliated. It’s one of the most vulnerable moments I’ve ever seen in a movie about a celebrity, especially one co-produced by the celebrity themselves.
Yet since Céline has signed off on everything in this project, even a low moment serves a purpose. One might imagine that the singer is so optimistic about her recovery that she wants viewers to see her at her lowest, only to better appreciate her triumph later—perhaps her most athletic impulse. (She just told the BBC that she’s planning another Las Vegas show.) Or we might decide that she just wants to be transparent, even though this is the same woman who refuses to answer when one of her sons asks her “What’s your favorite color?” on camera. I think it’s two things: First, she hopes it will make fans struggling with illness and disability feel less alone—philanthropy for conditions ranging from cystic fibrosis to AIDS has been part of her brand for decades. Second, the fact that she might feel like she’s showing herself in crisis is the best possible response to fans who still wonder why she’s not touring and releasing music. She seems to feel guilty, at one point comparing herself to an apple tree that once produced perfect fruit but whose branches are beginning to die.
When I first watched the film, I almost didn’t notice how little Céline plays in it. Almost all of the new images show her wandering around her Vegas mansion, having fun with her kids, or doing sports medicine sessions. Her biggest excursions are to the warehouse where she keeps her personal archives and costumes, and to a recording studio where she can dub her own lines in the French version of Priyanka Chopra’s romantic comedy. Love once again. In Review I could see how hard Taylor had to work on the stock footage – all those displays of power and finesse – to alleviate the film’s claustrophobia. Céline is a woman who was once so confident that she could perform a ragga song at the Essence Awards in her own version of the patois. Today we watch her listen to the reading of her struggling voice and see her face become petrified. She shakes her head, disturbed by this double fault which should have been an asset. “I don’t like it,” she tells her sound engineers and looks like she’s about to cry.
Some athletes retire when they start to slow down. They know what awaits them and want to end the way they want. Others continue to fight until their bodies refuse them. The film tells us that Céline is the second type. We keep hearing that she hasn’t finished performing, that she will find a way to fill the stadiums again. The film strives to suggest a future that its representation of the present does not promise – because for Céline, to be on stage is to exist. To be is to sing. “I think I was very good,” she says at one point. “I think I had some stuff that was amazing. But there were times when I had to go to the studio and I knew they wanted Celine Dion” – and she couldn’t give it to them. What would it mean to be Celine Dion anyway? Céline sighs as she sums up: “She’s the best. »