MONTREAL.- It was a Friday night in Montreal, and hundreds of euphoric revelers were dancing and singing Its All Coming Back to Me Now at a sold-out Celine Dion tribute party. One young man vogued in a homemade version of the gold-tinted headpiece of singed peacock feathers that Dion wore at the Met Gala a few years ago. Another gawked at a minishrine of Dion-inspired wigs, showcasing her hairstyles through the decades.
In an era of arrogant stars, she is always authentic, Simon Venne, the voguer, a 38-year-old stylist, gushed. She is everything to us, a source of pride, our queen.
If there was ever a sense that Quebec, the French-speaking province of Dions birth, was conflicted about Dions rise to global superstardom with pop hits that she often sang in English, it has been dispelled. She now occupies an exalted space here, experiencing a cultural renaissance as Quebecs younger generation has unabashedly embraced her: Radio Canada, the national French language broadcaster, parses her life on a podcast translated as Celine: Shes The Boss! A recent docuseries called Its Cool to Like Celine Dion explored her appeal to millennials. And Celine Dion drag competitions have been surging.
Dions emotional announcement this month that she is suffering from a rare neurological condition called stiff person syndrome, forcing her to postpone tour dates, was met with an extraordinary outpouring. Québécois politicians from across the political spectrum, including both Quebecs premier, François Legault, and the head of a party advocating Quebecs independence from Canada, jockeyed to express sympathy for Dion, 54. Fans commiserated over social media.
A headline in Le Devoir, an influential Quebec newspaper, called her Celine, Queen of the Québécois. Dion, the newspaper noted, had attained the status of untouchable icon after years of being panned by critics and mocked by others.
Its like hearing your aunt is sick, Venne, the feathered fan, said. Celine is famous around the world, but here she is family.
The intensity of the reaction here 25 years after the premiere of the blockbuster film Titanic, which helped make Dions bombastically exuberant My Heart Will Go On ubiquitous shows how much Celine fandom and ideas of Québécois identity have evolved over time as the province, like its most famous daughter, has come of age.
During a recent visit to Celine Dion Boulevard in Charlemagne, a soulless stretch of road in the gritty working-class town of about 6,000 on the outskirts of Montreal where Dion was born, a group of 20-somethings said it was no longer embarrassing to admit to liking her music.
Being stuck at home during the pandemic made people nostalgic for the past, and everything old and vintage is in fashion, said Gabriel Guénette, 26, a university student and sometime Uber deliveryman, explaining why he and his friends were singing The Power of Love during karaoke nights. Dions unbridled message of hope and optimism, he added, resonated during uncertain times.
Older residents in Charlemagne still refer to her as notre petite Celine our little Celine and recall her days as a shy teenager who performed French ballads with her 13 brothers and sisters at her familys restaurant. Younger residents including Meghan Arsenault, 15, who attends the high school Dion did grew up singing her songs.
Across Quebec, a Francophone province of 8.5 million people that has been buffeted by centuries of subjugation and fears of being subsumed by the English language, Dion has at times been a polarizing figure. Even as many fans ardently embraced her, she was dismissed by some critics as the cultural equivalent of poutine, the Québécois snack of french fries and cheese curds drenched in gravy drunkenly and guiltily consumed at 3 a.m.
Some elites balked at her success, seeing in her sprawling working-class family, her garish outfits and her broken English an uncomfortable mirror of an old Quebec they preferred to forget. Some considered her quétaine, cheesy in Québécois argot.
And her singing in English has, at times, been an affront to hard-core Francophone nationalists. But when Dion thanked the audience with a Merci! at the Summer Olympics in Atlanta in 1996 after singing The Power of the Dream, the single word reverberated across the province, an affirmation that French Canada had gone global.
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Martin Proulx, a producer who hosted the podcast Celine, Shes the Boss! recalled that as a gay teenager in Montreal in the 1990s, he hid the fact that he was listening to her Lets Talk About Love album on his Sony Walkman.
It wasnt cool to love Celine when I was in high school. Kids my age were listening to hip-hop and heavy rock, and she was for soccer moms who watched Oprah, he recalled.
Now, he said, he could proudly proclaim his ardor, in part because a more confident Quebec has shed some of its past complexes. Members of the younger generation of Québécois, he said, seem less hung up than their parents or grandparents on issues of language and identity, and more likely to embrace Dions global stardom, financial success and bilingualism as a template for their own international aspirations.
We used to roll our eyes. Now we think shes pure genius, Proulx said. She never changed. We did.
Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Quebec-born music director of the Metropolitan Opera in New York, said his first memory of Dion was from 1984, when he was 8. Dion, who was 16, sang a song about a dove in front of Pope John Paul II and 60,000 people at Montreals Olympic Stadium. Nézet-Séguin said he had surged with pride that she was a fellow Quebecer, and said he sees Dion as a diva in the operatic sense of the word.
When I think about a diva, I think about personality, having something recognizable artistically, and one cant deny the virtuosic aspect of Celines singing, he said.
The intense interest in Dion is hardly limited to Quebec. Aline, a highly unusual, fictionalized film drawn from her life, drew buzz at last years Cannes Film Festival.
When a musical parody of Titanic called Titanique recently moved to a larger off-Broadway theater in New York, its producers promised More shows. More seats. More Celine.
And Dion is set to appear alongside Priyanka Chopra Jonas and Sam Heughan in a romantic comedy called Love Again that is expected in theaters in North America in May.
The fascination with Dion endures in part because her Cinderella story never grows old. As the youngest of 14 children of an accordion-playing butcher and a homemaker from Charlemagne, Dions first bed as a child was a drawer.
At the age of 12, she cowrote her first song, Ce nétait quun rêve, with the help of her mother and her brother Jacques. Her brother Michel sent a cassette demo to impresario René Angélil, who became her manager and, later, her husband.
Dion had a complete makeover, disappearing for 18 months in 1986 to study English, cap her teeth, perm her hair, and take voice and dance lessons. A star was born.
When Angélil died in 2016, two days before his 74th birthday, his two-day, meticulously choreographed funeral at Montreals Notre-Dame Basilica was televised by the CBC, the national broadcaster, and flags were lowered at half-staff across Quebec. Dion, veiled in black, stood by her husbands open casket for seven hours, greeting Quebec dignitaries and the public.
In the years since, Dion recast her analog image for the Instagram era. A Vetements Titanic hoodie she wore in Paris in 2016 broke the internet. A few years later, she stole the show at the camp-themed Met Gala, in an Oscar de la Renta clinging champagne-colored bodysuit embellished with silvery sequins.
Her zany, self-deprecating appearance on James Cordens Carpool Karaoke in 2019 from Las Vegas, during which she sang My Heart Will Go On in front of a replica of the Titanics bow at the Bellagio Hotel fountain, helped some people who had made fun of her realize that she was in on the joke.
Now her fandom seems as strong as ever.
Mario Bennett, 36, who works at a concert hall, began covering every inch of his cramped basement apartment with Dion memorabilia at the start of the pandemic. He said that throughout his life, her powerful voice had been a clarion call to dream big. Among his prized possessions is an unauthorized collectible Celine doll, wearing a version of the midnight blue velvet gown that the singer wore to the Oscars in 1998.
She makes me feel that anything is possible, he said.
Guy Hermon, an Israeli drag queen who emigrated to Montreal a decade ago and absorbed Quebec culture and the French language by trying to embody Dion, said he had never been a fan of her music but invented his Dion alter ego, Crystal Slippers, out of necessity on the Dion-obsessed Québécois drag circuit.
After years of mimicking Dion, he said he had come to appreciate her.
She just wants everyone to be happy, he said.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.