“I am: Céline Dion”: in the Amazon documentary, the global star talks about her illness

At some point, around the last quarter of this film, you want to look somewhere else. Past the screen, out the window, at a picture on the wall, whatever. You even want to leave the room, just like you would want to leave an emergency room or a hospital, because what you are seeing is so painfully intimate and personal that you feel like a damn voyeur, like someone staring at an accident on the highway. You would be happy if someone in the film would say to the camera: “Please move on.”

But nobody does. We see the singer Céline Dion, emaciated on a stretcher, writhing in convulsions. A carer and an emergency doctor are with her, they talk to her, but she can hardly answer. Her upper lip is trembling violently, only a very loud howl comes out of her mouth, her thin body is bent and cramped. The doctor says they should try nasal spray now. Céline Dion hardly notices this. Her head is rigid as the doctor pumps two or three puffs of spray into her nose.

Your today is sad, not entertaining

This is what the battle of one of the world’s most famous singers against an illness that is tightening its grip and which Dion initially ignored and which she has now been fighting against for years looks like. Hence this film “I am: Céline Dion”. It is only entertaining when Dion tells a few stories from the past or the documentary shows concert moments and performances from the past. Today is not entertaining.

Instead, is it worth watching? Informative? It all doesn’t really fit. At some point, it doesn’t matter whether it’s Céline Dion you’re watching. The woman could just as easily work in a coffee shop or be a kindergarten teacher. The battle she’s waging against her illness is not the battle of a global star, but of a 56-year-old woman and mother of three who just wants to carry on living as she has before. As a global star, she wants to carry on singing because that’s all she has, she says: her voice. If that doesn’t touch you in these 76 minutes, you must be made of stone.

Céline Dion suffers from a very rare disease called “Stiff Person Syndrome”, an autoimmune disease that primarily affects nerves and muscles and repeatedly makes the motor system uncontrollable. The body is literally attacked by muscle cramps, movements such as walking or dancing become difficult or even impossible. There is currently no cure for “SPS” because medicine does not yet know exactly where it comes from, which is also due to the fact that it is a rare condition.

According to estimates, 300 people in Germany suffer from the disease. It is not life-threatening. According to medicine, it has a slow but steady progression, the symptoms of which can be alleviated with sometimes heavy doses of medication such as cortisone. But these can also change lives. Or, as in this case, end the life that Dion had before the illness. That is what “I am: “Celine Dion.”

Céline Dion attracted attention with her voice as a twelve-year-old

Born in 1968 in Charlemagne, a small town north of Montreal in Canada, Céline Dion grew up as one of 14 children in modest circumstances. It was her mother who encouraged her children to pursue music and wrote and composed their first songs.

Céline was already noticed at the age of twelve with her voice, which had a great volume for her age. At 13, her debut album was released, in French at the time. At 15, she became the first Canadian artist to receive a gold record in France, at 20 she won the Eurovision Song Contest for Switzerland, and so her career continued upwards, initially only in France and Canada. Her international breakthrough came in 1992 with the title song “Beauty and the Beast” for the Disney film of the same name. Her trademark became big, powerful ballads such as “The Power of Love” or “My Heart Will Go On” for James Cameron’s “Titanic”, which won her the Oscar for best film song in 1998.

With her soprano voice, which spans three octaves and allows her to hold a note for up to 15 seconds, Dion is one of the most powerful singers in pop. Despite all her success, however, she has always had to live with the criticism that she only shines in big ballads, that she has a lot of voice but little soul, which she has – and this is where it gets mean – in common with the singer Michael Bolton.

She sold 170 million albums

But no matter, before Taylor Swift’s success, Céline Dion was one of the most successful artists in pop history, with 170 million albums sold. And between 2000 and 2010, she was one of the highest earners, with almost $248 million. A career that was abruptly interrupted in 2022 when Dion made her illness public and canceled a European tour. She has not performed since then.

“I am: Celine Dion”, directed by Irene Taylor, now shows her biography in many concert moments and filmed memories of her childhood. It doesn’t take long to understand that first a girl and then a woman believed that she had found the purpose of her existence in her voice, her singing and her music. “My voice determined my life,” says Dion, “I followed it, I let it lead me…” then she pauses, “…and that was okay.”

Dion talks about her voice as if it were a tool that has a life of its own within her. She uses her hands to show how she stretches her vocal cords and what warm-up techniques her voice requires. When her fingers demonstrate this in the air, it looks as if she is handling long noodles.

As if the sound would shatter in her throat

Then she sits there again and wants to demonstrate it, a high note. She manages it, but only for a very short time, then it sounds as if the note is splintering in her throat. She tries again, “it’s not a voice, it’s the muscles in front of it,” she says, and the note splinters again. Céline Dion has tears in her eyes, she experiences every day as a day of destruction. Her voice is still there, she can speak, but she can no longer do what she needs to live.

It’s a bit like a painter suddenly not being able to see colors but only black and white, or a chef not being able to taste anything with his tongue. In Celine Dion’s case, it’s even more tragic because, in her opinion, it was her voice that brought her concerts to a worldwide audience, including twelve years in Las Vegas with interruptions.

Fans who had paid a lot of money and who she had to lie to more often than the illness struck her. She had cancelled concerts with made-up reasons. She had been on stage and hadn’t come back after the first costume change. She had stuffed herself with medication, the effects of which had worn off after just four or five songs.

In 2016 her husband died
Céline Dion moves people with honest statements about her husband’s death

19.09.2019

Breaking an agreement with their audience

“It’s hard to give a concert, but it’s harder not to give one,” she says, and you can see her horror at having betrayed her fans. It’s a breach of an agreement with her audience, an agreement that made her rich and famous and her fans happy with her songs. She later tried to repair it and released a long video speech. She explained it and apologized. A speech that is shown in the film, but which leaves open whether this Céline Dion, this “My Heart Will Go On” will ever come back.

“I am: Celine Dion”
(amazon prime)