I Am: Celine Dion (M. 103 minutes)
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4 stars
With Jennifer Lopez getting ridiculed within an inch of her life - if you know, you know - because of her extravaganza of self-celebration that is the visual album film This Is Me... Now and its sister documentary, you have to ask if this is really the right time for another singing diva to be releasing a self-reflective documentary just now.
But hold up and keep an open mind here, because Celine Dion is experiencing a real tragedy in her life and rather than hide away from the world, she's punching her way through it and allowing cameras in to document it. The resulting Amazon Prime film is riveting viewing.
Celine Dion has always been something of an enigma to me. No cowboy Barbie like Taylor Swift, she's presented on stage more like Julie Bishop death-staring journalists. With the dance moves of a Jane Fonda aerobics video, she nevertheless inspired cult-like devotion from fans because of that marvellous voice.
Once, when backpacking through Africa in the early 2000s, I was on a tour bus driven by a manic and violently homophobic Afrikaans man who frightened the bus into silence at a border crossing as he was smuggling something, but for all his macho behaviour he did idolise Celine Dion, and across five days he flipped his Greatest Hits cassette tape ad nauseam.
What I learned hearing her songs dozens of times each is that I love her uniquely French-Canadian phrasing and pronunciation.
Filmmaker Irene Taylor was an Oscar nominee for The Final Inch in 2009, a film about the reemergence of polio in third world nations, which makes her as qualified as any filmmaker covering Celine Dion's current medical issues.
Initially, in her enormous Las Vegas mansion - her butler's pantry is bigger than my whole house - you wonder if this is more of a Barbara Hutton Poor Little Rich Girl doco where we're feeling sorry for the obvious loneliness of the rich widow as she goes from room to room to room.
But the film opens with the statement, "This film contains powerful scenes of medical trauma", and we certainly do get that.
Dion suffers from Stiff Person Syndrome - I warn you in this age of internet cancellation to joke about the name of this condition at your own peril - and we do watch her suffer.
The rictus that takes hold of Dion's body in the film's most powerful scene happens quickly, fortunately while her medical team are present; we see her convulsing, crying and in obvious agony. She's a brave woman for allowing the whole thing to make the final edit - it is hard to watch.
Dion shares that her body has been slowly working toward the current extremities of illness she is experiencing for a long time, and takes us back through concert footage looking at some of the tricks she would use on stage to hide her declining voice, like holding the microphone out for the audience to sing along.
She's a woman who lives for music - she can't read a note or hold a conversation without musically arranging her words, and the cameras follow a slow rehab as she tries to record new music.
That's the triumph-of-spirit that makes Irene Taylor's doco so watchable, whatever you might feel about Dion and her music. Watch her writhe around a lounger by her enormous pool as she rasps along to a Maria Callas song, watch her study artists like our own John Farnham whose voice is listenable because of a husky rasp like the one she finds herself now working with.
Like that smuggling Afrikaans bus driver of my youth, Dion has fans everywhere, of every kind and they're loyal and fervent. While I felt like J-Lo's recent documentary was self-celebratory, Dion is doing this for those fans.
