Celine Dion’s thrilling hymn to love in Paris 2024

I walk at midnight Paris a hot air balloon raises the Olympic flame and lights up the magnificent Tuileries Gardens. The aerial image of international television slowly crosses the Seine from a drone flight. The rain falls heavily as the stage is set up on the Champ de Mars, darkened for the occasion. Who will sing? Celine Dion who could be defined as the biggest star of this Canada that still speaks French, even if, in reality, it would be unfair. Dion, who has already recorded the theme song of Titanic and turned it into a heart-rending crowd anthem, he can now sing something from that time when a producer recommended he record in English. His name, at this point, It’s too much for too many people. . Just take a quick look at their numbers on a platform like Spotify – or Carl Wilson’s famous essay — to give form to an indecipherable symbol of modern song, where we find them, almost without contradicting each other, the romantic angst of the grand piano ballad (impossible not to remember his version for All alone), the lightness of a perfect pop by Max Martin (It’s like that), flirt with him rhythm and blues and songs by the Beatles and Janis Joplin which she sang in the family as the youngest of fourteen siblings.

Now, the image of the international signal is parked on the first level of the Eiffel Tower and what we see is a 56-year-old woman, wearing a long dress and an elegantly draped cape with fringes on the sleeves. It’s Celine Dion . Maybe the most moving moment of the inauguration of Paris 2024 for some reasons.

But first, please rewind.

In early 2024, the singer was spotted on stage after several months of unprecedented silence. He did so notably at the Grammy ceremony, where he presented the award for best album of the year to Taylor Swift.

A few years ago, the voice of Because you loved me and the classic My heart will go on had postponed the concerts of his tour Courage so many times that her name was synonymous with uncertainty. Until December 2022, the singer told her followers that she had been diagnosed with stiff person syndrome (SPR ), a condition which does not allow him to “sing like I’m used to” as he explained on stage with the coveted golden gramophone.

Neurological disorder can cause uncontrolled muscle spasms that make movement difficult and above all leave her without control of her instrument, of her voice.

In an interview with BNC , Dion said that when she sang, she felt like someone was pressing hard on her neck. : “It’s as if someone was strangling me (…) you can’t lower or raise (your tone), there’s a spasm.”

He also confessed that although he publicly shared his diagnosis in 2022, in reality secretly fighting with the SPR for over 17 years The aim was to hide it from her husband and father of her children, René Angélil, who was battling throat cancer (he eventually died in 2016).

“I had to raise my kids, I had to hide. I had to try to be a hero, when I felt like my body was giving up on me. (I was) holding on to my own dreams,” the singer said.

The documentary I am Celine Dion —available in streaming Amazon Prime Video — shows a passage of vulnerability in the Canadian’s life. In an interview with New York Times its director Irene Taylor He tells how he managed to achieve total intimacy with the artist.

“You’re in my house,” Dion tells him right away. “The fact that you’re here means I let you in.” Don’t ask me for permission to film anything ” Precisely, one of these intimate scenes occurs towards the end of I am Celine Dion. The scene is crude and shows the artist convulsing during physical therapy. .

“I saw a rigidity that had nothing to do with the free and agile dancer that I had been filming for several months during physiotherapy,” the director told Times. “After a few minutes, I was moaning in pain.” .

Taylor said she wasn’t sure if the singer was breathing because at first she was moaning, but then has stopped .

“I put the microphone, which was on a pole that you could discreetly approach the person, under the table. I couldn’t hear her breathing. I felt very panicked. I looked around and saw her therapist calling her head of security. Her bodyguard immediately came into the room. “I realized right away that these two men were there to take care of her, they were trained to do so.”

The documentary also includes a controversial photo of Celine Dion’s face which, for nearly two minutes, forces us to see her torn apart by pain .

The director explains it through a Buddhist teaching. According to Taylor, “there is a Tibetan Buddhist parable about a goddess called Green Tara, who is said to be disguised and living in the world as a suffering human. This parable teaches you that when you see a person suffering on the side of the road when you see someone’s body devastated by poverty or violence, you should not look away because if your love can touch someone’s experience, you are cultivating compassion “.

“I love my job because I’m trying to access a human experience that I may not have direct contact with. But if I don’t look away, if I look at that and don’t flinch, something develops inside me that compels me to try to understand that person better,” the director told the Times.

So he didn’t cut the scene.

His idea was go far enough for people to feel their own experience without running away.

As Taylor’s documentary explains, the muscle spasms Dion suffered were so repeated and so severe that, at times, caused rib fractures .

Over time, your arms and legs may also become so stiff that It will be very difficult for you to move again .

“(This illness) didn’t take anything away from me,” the singer says on the record.I’m going back on stage, even if I have to crawl . Even if I have to talk with my hands, I will.

Perhaps this is why Celine Dion thrilled the world with her performance at the opening of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games.

Climbed to the first landing of the Eiffel Tower and accompanied by a rain-soaked grand piano, Celine Dion performed a heartbreaking version of Ode to love of Edith Piaf .

His words read as follows:

If one day life takes you away from me

if you die, if you are far from me

I don’t care if you love me

because I’m going to die too…

we will have eternity for us

in the blue of all the immensity

in heaven, no more problems

my love, do you think we love each other?

God brings together those who love each other!

“What we just saw is indescribable,” says the driver of the Latin American signal Claro Sports . She is a “vocal athlete,” applauds pop artist Kelly Clarkson on the live show of the American network NBC. “A courageous and blissful return,” says the Guardian English, where they added that she was seen “with the enthusiasm of someone who, as she herself said, is more eager to return to tour than her fans.”

In just under four minutes, the singer made her own the sentiments of the 1949 song, written by Piaf for a lover who died in a plane crash.

When he finished, he seemed almost to burst into tears at the most sincere moment of his outburst. Paris 2024 The truth is that, despite the consequences that the SPR has left on his life, for the moment Celine Dion He has no plans to leave the big stages .