The director of Beware the Slenderman (2016), Scouts: The Hidden History / Leave No Trace (2022) and Trees, and Other Entanglements (2023) immersed itself in the intimacy of the popular Canadian singer to portray her fight against Rigid Person Syndrome (RPS), a neurological ailment that affects the central nervous system.
I’m Celine Dion (I Am: Celine Dion, United States/2024). Director: Irene Taylor. Photography: Nick Midwig. Edition: Richard Comeau and J. Christian Jensen. Music: Redi Hasa. Duration: 102 minutes. Available on Amazon Prime Video from Tuesday, June 25.
I never liked Céline Dion’s songs. Not that this opinion is particularly relevant, but when one approaches a documentary about an artist there is in principle a greater or lesser emotional connection if one admires that figure or not. The important thing, really, is that although I hate even My Heart Will Go Onthe leitmotif of TitanicI was moved to see this documentary by Irene Taylor about the fight of the 56-year-old Canadian star against a rare disease that causes rigidity, spasms and increased sensitivity to external stimuli, which induce very painful muscle contractions and have made it difficult for her to a lot now, not only performing live but even recording in the studio and even walking at times.
Without cheap shots, without makeup (in the literal and figurative sense), with brutal honesty, opening wide the doors of her home, Dion exposes the day-to-day life of her fight against MRS, a syndrome that took a long time to resolve. make public (he did so only in December 2022 on his Instagram account) and after he had to interrupt or cancel several concerts.
The experience of getting close to Dion’s afflictions and anguish is heartbreaking, but there is no gloating or manipulation here. Everything is so pure and directing, so crystalline, without filters, that it hurts a lot. While Taylor shows us how Céline takes dozens of pills a day and undergoes all kinds of treatments, she also reconstructs (without talking heads beyond the protagonist herself and with many home movies and archive material) her childhood (there were 14! brothers), adolescence, youth and adulthood as a star on a global scale of an artist who owns that multifaceted and portentous voice that sang in both French and English, but that currently appears weakened, faint. Beyond how extreme the documentary is in general terms, Dion never loses her sense of humor, something that she has always cultivated and that can be seen in clips of interviews with Jimmy Fallon or James Corden and in her participation in the film Deadpool.
The film is also an exhibition of the other side of the glamor and fame that marked the diva’s public appearances for decades. In 2016, Dion suffered the death due to cancer of René Angélil, a musician who was her manager, but above all her husband (“the love of my life”) for 22 years, and today she lives almost without leaving the mansion in Las Vegas that she shares with her three children, the publicists and the different doctors who assist her. In that sense, more than the typical documentary celebrating an artist as in so many hagiographies, we are faced with the portrait of a woman who displays enormous strength to resist, fight and endure with the greatest possible dignity and fortitude the main challenge that confronts her. raised life. A visceral, cathartic, confessional film and – in its own way – as beautiful as it is valuable.
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