The real Céline

Singer Celine Dion. (Ralph Orlowski/Associated Press)

When Céline Dion returns to her birthplace, she often repeats the same comment in interviews, one that warms the hearts of her Quebec fans. The international pop diva, worth an estimated $250 million US, says she likes coming home to Quebec because she can go to a dépanneur (convenience store) and no one will bother her. It’s unlikely that Dion, who is currently performing five nights a week to sold-out crowds at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas, slips down to the corner shop for a beer like the rest of us. But if she did, fans here would probably not swarm her.

In Quebec, Dion’s status, in fact her very identity, is startlingly different from what it is elsewhere in the world. Here, she is Céline, avec accent, the country girl from a large Quebec family who made it big. And nothing illustrates this better than last week’s release of D’elles, billed as a “concept album” honouring womanhood.

In la belle province, the launch of Dion’s first French-language album in four years has been akin to a family reunion. The release was preceded by Céline Dion D’elles, a two-hour TV special broadcast featuring Dion and the doyennes of the Quebec literary and media scene, all of whom contributed songs to the album: TV writer, journalist and popular educator Janette Bertrand; journalist, feminist and former Parti Quebecois minister Lise Payette; journalist and novelist Denise Bombardier; and writer Marie Laberge, one of Quebec’s best-known playwrights. They are enthusiastically playing the role of Dion’s clucking matantes, an affectionate Quebec term for a maternal, usually bosomy, auntie figure.
 
Images of Dion and her adoring collaborators hugging each other and crying seemed to be everywhere this past week. The central message of the emotionally fraught buzz is this: Céline may live in Las Vegas, and she may have released more albums in English than French, but she is first and foremost a member of la famille Québécoise. While some of the new songs were composed by well-known writers from France (including Nina Bouraoui, Christine Orban and Françoise Dorin), Dion and her astute manager/husband, René Angelil, also picked four of the most respected and accomplished female figures in Quebec to contribute. Their choices are a Quebec publicist’s dream.

(Sony Music Canada)

Eighty-two-year-old Janette Bertrand, essentially the grandmother at this family party, penned the album’s lullaby, Berceuse, as a tribute to Céline’s relationship with her son, René Charles. Bertrand is an institution; at the height of her TV career, Janette, who still has a massive following, was Quebec’s Oprah. Lise Payette is the creator of Les dames de coeur (Women of the Heart). The popular téléroman about four women on the cusp of 50 had a major impact on Quebec society in the 1980s. While many men who grew up watching TV in the '80s complain that the popular soap’s feminist agenda psychologically castrated them, the show inspired women across the province to found “les dames de coeur” supper clubs.
 
Payette seems to represent Dion’s wise, compassionate aunt at the D’elles reunion. On Payette's TV program Tête-à-tête in 1992, the 24-year-old Dion, then a rising star, broke down in tears over her treatment by the Quebec media. (In trying to revamp her image for the English market, Dion was the butt of many public jokes; after she capped her teeth, many took to calling her “Canine Dion.”) Payette wrote what I believe is the new collection’s best song: Je cherche l’ombre (I seek the shadows), a moving ballad about the pain of being a woman in the spotlight.

Marie Laberge appears to have a less maternal relationship to the pop diva than the other contributors. Laberge’s song, Le temps qui compte (Time that counts), explores how time moves too quickly for a star such as Dion, “who isn’t even 40 years old and who has already had a 25-year career,” as Laberge told one reporter.

Controversial public intellectual Denise Bombardier contributed La Diva, a song inspired by the tragic life of Greek opera singer Maria Callas. Dion describes Bombardier as a “courageous woman who defends what she cares about”; Dion commissioned the song after reading a Mother’s Day column Bombardier wrote in Montreal’s French-language daily Le Devoir. In it, the journalist attempted to describe the tender, frustrating and sometimes violent emotions mothers experience. It was a meeting with Dion backstage in Las Vegas that led Bombardier to pick Callas as her subject. “She appeared very fragile and reminded me of Callas. I told her that,” Bombardier has said. Dion told Bombardier that Callas has always fascinated her.
 
The two-hour television special offered fascinating insight into the Céline avec accent. Nestled comfortably on a couch with Bertrand, Payette, Bombardier, Laberge and host Julie Snyder, Dion worked hard to project an image of an average Quebecois working girl who longs to spend more time with her family. She revealed what her ideal day would involve when the relentless Las Vegas schedule finishes up: putting a few things in her crock pot, taking her son to school and sharing her homemade meal with her husband at the end of the day. The girls didn’t confine their talk to things culinary; they also discussed the pros and cons of breast-feeding, a working mother’s guilt and Dion’s relationship with René. (Céline says she’s the boss.) The rake-thin diva also addressed body image in a gushy and bizarre soliloquy about her admiration for her mother’s corpulent figure.

“Those folds of fat represent love to me. I know you don’t always like how you look, Mom. But I think you’re beautiful,” she told “Maman Dion,” as she’s referred to in Quebec. As is usually the case when Céline makes a Quebec appearance, the elder Dion was sitting in the studio audience.

(Sony Music Canada)

It’s not just Dion who wants people to think she’s une vraie Québecoise; entertainment journalists here add their own chapters to this surreal narrative. At a press conference for D’elles in downtown Montreal, a bemused Payette quipped, “When I entered the room, I had the impression that someone was going to announce a cure for cancer. All we did was write some songs.” In a preview of the TV special, La Presse journalist Louise Cousineau noted, “Celine doesn’t just sing for us in this show. Because we are family, she allows us into her private life.” Cousineau’s piece was part of the newspaper’s “Céline weekend,” which included an article comparing Dion’s French and English albums. Its conclusion: while Dion is heavily influenced by American singers such as Barbra Streisand, she’s also a product of the musical tradition established by renowned Quebec chanteuse and nationalist Pauline Julien. As a result, the journalist wrote, the pop diva’s “soul is saved.”

The La Presse expert panel also decided — quelle surprise — that Dion’s French albums were better. And on that point, they may be right. The most impressive thing about Dion’s sugary, overly produced English ballads is the range of her voice (five octaves). En français, Dion simply has more soul. On D'Eux (1996) the best-selling French-language album of all time, she explored the dilemma of a small-town girl trying to make it big. On 1 fille et 4 types (2003), she collaborated with some well-established singer-songwriters from France — Jacques Veneruso, Erick Benzi and guitarist Gildas Arzel — which gave her work more credibility in Europe.

D’elles reunites the singer with legendary Paris producer Jean-Jacques Goldman. Although it is likely a contrived attempt to redefine herself as a highbrow diva, the CD also expresses the genuine connection Dion has with her Quebec fans, specifically, and la Francophonie in general. Céline is indeed very different from Celine. She’s not quite the small-town Quebecer everyone wants her to be, but en français, she’s not the frighteningly automaton-like Celine sans accent.

Dion’s gruelling Las Vegas gig ends Dec. 15. Perhaps she’ll use the time to fulfill her crock-pot fantasy, which so amused her adoring matantes. Or not. René’s got a world tour planned for 2008. 

D’elles is in stores now. 

Patricia Bailey is a Montreal-based writer and broadcaster.

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