What if Celine Dion wasn’t perfect? That’s the terrifying high-concept premise behind her latest single, “Imperfections,” and it’s an unsettling speculation that we don’t even want to consider. Lucky for us, we don’t have to. Because in the bop’s music video, queen Celine does a frankly abysmal job convincing us that she’s anything but perfect, singing in a perfect voice about her inadequacies while stunting in couture perfectly. The drama of her body language in billowing sleeves? Heaven. Her stripes and oversize polka dots and large hat wide-stanced Cirque du Soleil fashion narrative? Art. Her running, Bird Box blindfolded, toward the camera in black-and-white like a high-glamour human embodiment of that old-timey movie of the train driving toward the audience? The Lumière brothers wish! We know she’s perfect. She knows she’s perfect. You have your own imperfections? Celine, where?
The cognitive dissonance demanded by Celine here is the equivalent of Sutton Foster singing “I don’t wanna show off” at the Tony Awards while putting her 10,000 talents on display, or Corbin Bleu insisting “I Don’t Dance” in High School Musical 2 while doing a quite good baseball dance. After all, this is the benevolent legend who stopped an entire Las Vegas show to let a fan pee without missing a moment. This is the wise goddess who shuts down disastrous tattoo concepts. No amount of emerging out of an inky pool of Under the Skin abyss-water or giving us your best impression of Millie Bobby Brown’s nighttime skin-care routine will convince us otherwise, Celine! That goes for you too, fantastically Quebecois music video director, Gabriel Coutu Dumont. The jig is up!
