My heart will go on. But not this time. Not after seeing I am: Celine Dionthe poignant documentary about the singer of Titanic (because, let’s face it, that’s what you immediately think of when you say the name of Celin Dion), available from June 25th on Prime Video. The first scene immediately makes you skip a beat. The last one makes you empty an entire pack of tissues. In the middle there is a story that, with great dignity, reveals the singer’s last 17 nightmare years. Without ever falling into trash. And not even in victimhood.
The documentary opens with a sign warning about the presence of shocking medical scenes. And you think: “I grew up with Doctor Pimple Popper and Embarrassing Illnesses, what is this?” Instead, the punch to the stomach arrives, direct, and you feel it. Because one thing is the splatter or the voyeurism of people who are filmed in the operating room, another is seeing a broken soul who, helplessly, stiffens on the ground, losing what is most precious to him: his voice.
In fact, if in recent years Celine Dion often canceled her concerts, it was not because of the “infections” that she boasted about. There was a much more serious reason behind it: she suffers from PRS, that is stiff person syndrome. “A disease of the nervous system, extremely rare: it affects one or two people in a million,” Dion explains in the documentary. The first symptoms arrived 17 years ago when she began to experience laryngospasms: “after breakfast her voice went up while, after concerts, it dropped half a tone lower”. Her vocal alteration prevented her from doing long sound checks but above all from warming up for long: “this exposed me to dangers”. Then came the lameness and the problems walking. The singer then starts taking medicine: 80 – 90 mg of Valium. Per day. “One, two, five pills. Too many,” admits Dion, “I could have died but the show had to go on.” The escalation was inevitable because the effect of the medicines was transitory. She sometimes disappeared just when she was still there, on stage, singing. When it happened she turned the microphone towards the audience, inviting them to sing with her. In reality, it was only the audience who was screaming at the top of their lungs: she couldn’t. She couldn’t. Her sound died between her vocal chords.
“I hated lying to my fans,” Dion continues, “but I wasn’t ready to tell the truth. Now I am.” So he looks straight into the camera, his eyes shining and his face completely free of make-up. She appears old, very old. But above all broken. Consumed in the soul. She is moved and with a broken voice adds: “I miss music a lot. I was very good, I think”, almost as if together with her voice, even her identity had disappeared. She no longer knows who she is, because she has always been “Dion, the one with the unreachable voice”. The camera shows her beautiful house: rich and opulent like that of the stars. For a moment you feel a little envious – especially at the sight of the wardrobe overflowing with shoes – but it’s only a moment because as soon as she says “I can’t go out. I’m stuck in here” that house becomes a cage. Beautiful. But still a prison.
Now she’s ready to tell the truth, Celin. So she sits down at the piano and sings. Her voice can’t hold up. It doesn’t seem like hers anymore. But it is. “I don’t want people to hear me like this,” the singer bursts into tears. The hardest part comes at the end, when she goes, stubborn, to the acting room. After two years of intensive physiotherapy, complete rest and targeted medicines she has to know if she can still sing: “I can’t live in doubt.” We won’t spoil the ending, but it’s very hard: it overwhelms you, it makes you feel sick and we need a sign to warn us again. But not for the shocking scene. Someone should warn us that we need at least half a pack of tissues to get to the end of the docu. “I won’t stop,” Dion promises, “if I can’t run, I’ll walk; if I can’t walk, I’ll crawl.” The credits roll and you, from the couch, would like to think that, yes, she’s right: she’ll make it. Somehow she’ll make it. If it weren’t for the fact that this documentary also tells another story…
