“I always envy people who smoke and drink and party and don’t sleep,” Celine Dion tells her physical therapist with an exaggerated sigh, midway through the new documentary “I Am: Celine Dion.” “Me, I have water and I sleep 12 hours.”This monastic constraint has long been a core part of the Celine Dion legend.
In a cruel twist of fate, though, even the ceaseless care Dion devoted to her voice could not preserve it.
In 2022, she revealed in an emotional Instagram post that she has stiff person syndrome, a rare and incurable neurological disorder that causes painful muscle spasms and affects roughly one in a million people.
After watching “I Am: Celine Dion,” a remarkably candid portrait directed by Irene Taylor on Amazon Prime Video, it is difficult to imagine a disease that would be more personally devastating to Dion, whose entire career has been one long exercise in control, sacrificing all for the ecstatic release of live performance.
Since her emergence as a Québécois child star with a precociously huge voice, something about Dion’s essential nature has remained constant, impervious to both changing trends and scathing critique.
Persons:
“, Celine Dion, ”, Dion, Irene Taylor, who’d, Elisabeth Vincentelli, “ Dion
Organizations:
Amazon Prime
Locations:
York