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Eurovision Says 'Wait And See' on Celine Dion

Celine Dion's recorded message to the Eurovision Song Contest was played during the penultimate dress rehearsal. Fabrice COFFRINI / AFP
Celine Dion's recorded message to the Eurovision Song Contest was played during the penultimate dress rehearsal. Fabrice COFFRINI / AFP
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Eurovision Says 'Wait And See' on Celine Dion

Celine Dion's recorded message to the Eurovision Song Contest was played during the penultimate dress rehearsal. Fabrice COFFRINI / AFP
Celine Dion's recorded message to the Eurovision Song Contest was played during the penultimate dress rehearsal. Fabrice COFFRINI / AFP

Just hours before Saturday's Eurovision Song Contest grand final, organizers were tight-lipped about whether ailing superstar Celine Dion might make an emotional appearance, 37 years after winning the competition.
"Father Christmas exists, and you'll have to wait and see," Eurovision director Martin Green told a press conference, when asked directly if Dion might show up.

At both of Friday's dress rehearsals for the final, as at Tuesday's semi-final, a video message from Dion was played, with the presenters announcing that she could not be with them in Basel, Switzerland for the world's biggest televised live music event, AFP said.

But Eurovision 2025 co-executive producer Moritz Stadler said on Saturday that the show was still being adapted.

"There are constant changes. Our team has been working overnight until very late," he said. "We continue changing it for the grand final."

BBC television reported that Dion's private plane was in Basel, but did not know if she was on it.

And Swiss newspaper Blick said that selected staff with printed schedules for the final "can see that the recorded greeting from the rehearsals and the first Eurovision semi-final is no longer included".

"This indicates that the clip played during rehearsals has been replaced," the tabloid added.

Dion's health 'top priority'
Dion, 57, is now a global music icon. But she has never forgotten the role the song contest played in launching her on the international stage.

Dion was 20 and little-known outside her native French-speaking Quebec province in Canada when she won Eurovision in 1988, representing Switzerland with the song "Ne Partez Pas Sans Moi".
Switzerland duly hosted Eurovision 1989, where Dion opened the TV extravaganza with her winning French-language song.

She then premiered the single "Where Does My Heart Beat Now" -- heralding her career switch into English, which set her on the path to global chart domination.

With Eurovision 2025 returning to Switzerland, organizers reached out to Dion.

However, the singer is now battling a debilitating health condition and rarely appears in public.

"We are still in contact with Celine Dion. As always, her health remains our top priority," a Eurovision 2025 spokeswoman told AFP on Friday.

'Music unites us'
Dion first disclosed in December 2022 that she had been diagnosed with Stiff Person Syndrome, a painful autoimmune disorder which is progressive and for which there is no cure.

She was forced to cancel a string of shows scheduled for 2023 and 2024, saying she was not strong enough to tour.
But she gave a surprise, show-stopping performance from the Eiffel Tower at the Paris 2024 Olympics opening ceremony.

"I'd love nothing more than to be with you in Basel right now," Dion said in her video clip.

"Winning the Eurovision Song Contest for Switzerland in 1988 was a life-changing moment for me.

"Music unites us -- not only tonight, not only in this wonderful moment. It is our strength, our support, and our accompaniment in times of need."

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Movie Review: From Bumper to Bumper, ‘F1’ Is Formula One Spectacle 

Brad Pitt, from left, Lewis Hamilton, and Damson Idris attend the world premiere of "F1 The Movie" on Monday, June 16, 2025, in Times Square in New York. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)
Brad Pitt, from left, Lewis Hamilton, and Damson Idris attend the world premiere of "F1 The Movie" on Monday, June 16, 2025, in Times Square in New York. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)
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Movie Review: From Bumper to Bumper, ‘F1’ Is Formula One Spectacle 

Brad Pitt, from left, Lewis Hamilton, and Damson Idris attend the world premiere of "F1 The Movie" on Monday, June 16, 2025, in Times Square in New York. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)
Brad Pitt, from left, Lewis Hamilton, and Damson Idris attend the world premiere of "F1 The Movie" on Monday, June 16, 2025, in Times Square in New York. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)

The wide-screen spectacle of Formula One gets a gleaming, rip-roaring workout in Joseph Kosinski’s “F1,” a fine-tuned machine of a movie that, in its most riveting racing scenes, approaches a kind of high-speed splendor.

Kosinski, who last endeavored to put moviegoers in the seat of a fighter jet in “Top Gun: Maverick,” has moved to the open cockpits of Formula One with much the same affection, if not outright need, for speed. A lot of the same team is back. Jerry Bruckheimer produces. Ehren Kruger, a co-writer on “Maverick,” takes sole credit here. Hans Zimmer, a co-composer previously, supplies the thumping score.

And, again, our central figure is an older, high-flying cowboy plucked down in an ultramodern, gas-guzzling conveyance to teach a younger generation about old-school ingenuity and, maybe, the enduring appeal of denim.

But whereas Tom Cruise is a particularly forward-moving action star, Brad Pitt, who stars as the driving-addicted Sonny Hayes in “F1,” has always been a more arrestingly poised presence. Think of the way he so calmly and half-interestedly faces off with Bruce Lee in Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood.” In the opening scene of “F1,” he’s sleeping in a van with headphones on when someone rouses him. He splashes some water on his face and walks a few steps over to the Daytona oval, where he quickly enters his team’s car, in the midst of a 24-hour race. Pitt goes from zero to 180 mph in a minute.

Sonny, a long-ago phenom who crashed out of Formula One decades earlier and has since been racing any vehicle, even a taxi, he can get behind the wheel of, is approached by an old friend, Ruben Cervantes (Javier Bardem) about joining his flagging F1 team, APX. Sonny turns him down at first but, of course, he joins and “F1” is off to the races.

The title sequence, exquisitely timed to the syncopated rhythms of Zimmer’s score, is a blistering introduction. The hotshot rookie driver Noah Pearce (Damson Idris) is just running a practice lap, but Kosinski, his camera adeptly moving in and out of the cockpit, uses the moment to plunge us into the high-tech world of Formula One, where every inch of the car is connected to digital sensors monitored by a watchful team. Here, that includes technical director Kate McKenna (Kerry Condon) and Kaspar Molinski (Kim Bodnia), the team’s chief.

Verisimilitude is of obvious importance to the filmmakers, who bathe this very Formula One-authorized film in all the sleek operations and globe-trotting spectacle of the sport. That Apple, which produced the film, would even go for such a high-priced summer movie about Formula One is a testament to the upswing in popularity of a sport once quite niche in America, and of the halo effects of both the Netflix series “Formula 1: Drive to Survive” and the seven-time world champion Lewis Hamilton, an executive producer on “F1.”

Whether “F1” pleases diehards, I’ll leave to more ardent followers of the circuit. But what I can say definitively is that Claudio Miranda knows how to shoot it. The cinematographer, who has shot all of Kosinski’s films as well as wonders like Ang Lee’s “Life of Pi,” brings Formula One to vivid, visceral life. When “F1” heads to the big races, Miranda is always simultaneously capturing the zooming cars from the asphalt while backgrounding it with the sweeping spectacle of a course like the UK’s fabled Silverstone Circuit.

OK, you might be thinking, so the racing is good; is there a story? There’s what I’d call enough of one, though you might have to go to the photo finish to verify that. When Sonny shows up, and rapidly turns one practice vehicle into toast, it’s clear that he’s going to be an agent of chaos at APX, a low-ranking team that’s in heavy debt and struggling to find a car that performs.

This gives Pitt a fine opportunity to flash his charisma, playing Sonny as an obsessive who refuses any trophy and has no real interest in money, either. The flashier, media-ready Noah watches Sonny's arrival with skepticism, and the two begin more as rivals than teammates. Idris is up to the mano-a-mano challenge, but he’s limited by a role ultimately revolving around and reducing to a young Black man learning a lesson in work ethic.

A relationship does develop, but “F1” struggles to get its characters out of the starting blocks, keeping them closer to the cliches they start out as. The actor who, more than anyone, keeps the momentum going is Condon, playing an aerodynamics specialist whose connection with Pitt’s Sonny is immediate. Just as she did in between another pair of headstrong men in “The Banshees of Inisherin,” Condon is a rush of naturalism.

If there’s something preventing “F1” from hitting full speed, it’s its insistence on having its characters constantly voice Sonny’s motivations. The same holds true on the race course, where broadcast commentary narrates virtually every moment of the drama. That may be a necessity for a sport where the crucial strategies of hot tires and pit-stop timing aren't quite household concepts. But the best car race movies — from “Grand Prix” to “Senna” to “Ferrari” — know when to rely on nothing but the roar of an engine.

“F1” steers predictably to the finish line, cribbing here and there from sports dramas before it. (Tobias Menzies plays a board member with uncertain corporate goals.) When “F1” does, finally, quiet down, for one blissful moment, the movie, almost literally, soars. It's not quite enough to forget all the high-octane macho dramatics before it, but it's enough to glimpse another road “F1” might have taken.