All images provided by Kevin Mazur.
Relatively speaking, the format for Beyoncé’s Renaissance had been her return to traditional music release in a long time. Along with the album’s official announcement and a lead single to follow (“Break My Soul”), it had been one of the few recent instances in which Beyoncé had participated in the regular, radio-charting rollout of her own solo music. Since her surprise self-titled album drop in 2013, Beyoncé’s music releases had metamorphized into sense-layered digestives of an art piece: visual films, conceptual themes of chord-smashing betrayals and unapologetic Southern Blackness, transcendental performances that found themselves a chronologic notation of the stage’s history (Glastonbury, Super Bowl, Coachella). For almost a decade, new Beyoncé music didn’t mean just new sounds; it’s the pop culture equivalent of hearing about a multi-billion dollar rocket launch on the day of, destined to reach newer heights than the missions before.
The normal-artist Beyoncé didn’t last long. Soon, the Renaissance tour was announced, jokes about buying tickets to sold-out stadiums when “Break My Soul” told us to quit our jobs had circulated, and Beyoncé resurfaced to the public eye. In some ways, Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé, a concert documentary detailing the 56-city tour that concluded this past October, is a lateral move in terms of Beyoncé’s usual earth-moving projects, but when you’re resting easy on top, lateral moves might be a leveling gesture for the rest of modern performers who have yet to graze the bottom step of her legacy, now with a growing filmography.
Renaissance: A Film shares screen equity between the behind-the-scenes and the stage moments. While the tour lends itself to the hands of technicians, designers, and dancers, the filmmaking aspect of Renaissance largely lies in the 19-member editing team. In a single movement, there will be about five outfit changes. Montages, from the professional tour footage to the fisheye lens used for “Pure/Honey” to shaky phone cameras, are so cleanly sequenced that the film rarely feels like a compilation. Even Tameer Peak, the famous “Alien Superstar” fan who has attended several shows and was invited to the film’s premiere, would probably agree that this is yet a new way of experiencing the concert.
It might seem jumbling for those who had seen the unbreaking fluidity of Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour film, which was strictly intended for reliving the experience. Even Beyoncé’s Homecoming, which had its fair share of offstage thematic dictation, didn’t feel as disruptive as Renaissance. I think the complaints and wishes of those who hope to see a concert-cut of the tour are valid and hopefully will come true, but respectfully, that is what Renaissance the tour was for. Renaissance: A Film operates as a narrative and, like narrative films, it has a steady voice, story progression, and characters that complete the whole: her family, her crew, her inspirations, and her fans. And while I did mention that the film is a lateral move in some ways, Renaissance excels in the one thing that we haven’t seen in a long while: Beyoncé as a real person.
It sounds somewhat trite to say this about any hagiographical depiction (especially a piece directed, produced, written by, and starring the same person), but Renaissance has risks. Beyoncé’s selective privacy in interviews and social media has been one of the most illuminating presences (or absences) that underlie her public personas belted or snarled in her music: Yoncé as the vulgar, innuendo-driven vixen in limo backseats or bathtubs, Lemonade Beyoncé as the bat-smashing survivor of infidelity, Everything is Love Mrs. Carter as the phoenix of family controversy. We see all of this in her music, but Renaissance: A Film is introspective of Beyoncé’s musings on aging and autonomy that might not seem as sexy as the tracks on Renaissance has us believe.
But believe me, it works. We hear a lot of Beyoncé’s voice (which serves as a great representation of how Texan accents are more humming-melodic than pendulum-swingy) in the first part of the film, detailing the technical and artistic processes that went into the success of the tour. It’s my new favorite BTS fun fact of the year to share that the stage, which is made up of many video screens and steel beams, exist as three; as Beyoncé performs in one city, the crew sets up the other two stages for the upcoming cities (an act that might sound self-gratuitous, but in remembering that Beyoncé had paid the city of Washington DC to extend their public transportation operating hours so that fans can get home on time and doing a cursory review of the venue event archives for a few cities, I can bet that these venues were rented for two or three days to accommodate for one show-stopping night).
She also doesn’t shy away from the directorial authority, which has been a longtime controversy in her songwriting credits. Among the aerobatic traveling across the stage, grinding on top of a hydraulics-powered tank, and performing “Partition” with her parents in the audience, one of the most fearful things was watching Beyoncé get into it with a technical worker about widening the lens of a camera in order to capture the stage better. The conversation is cut off when Beyoncé mentions that she Googled that a wider lens did exist, which is the kind of admission that can seem self-defeating. But by the inclusion of that scene and Beyoncé’s directness, the film eradicates the perceived contraindications of Beyoncé’s ferocious stage persona and the self-contained woman offstage.
For the legacy that she has built for herself, one of the eye-widening spectacles in the movie is the flaws she wants us to see and how she gravitates toward public correction. While this might be not revelatory for some (recall how, when headlines splashed over Beyoncé’s lipsyncing to the National Anthem at Obama’s 2013 inauguration, she arrived to the pre-Super Bowl press conference later that month to perform the song again before taking questions, or the succinct lyrical response to an infamous family feud: “Of course sometimes shit go down when it’s a billion dollars on an elevator”), her setting the scene again for setback/instinctive fix is the best example of professional “show, don’t tell.” Woven in with the crowd favorites, the film plays all of the album’s track listing in the same order; when it finally gets into the flow, the audio suddenly cuts out when “Alien Superstar” begins, referring to the technical issue that occurred in Arizona. In the film, we see how Beyoncé and crew scramble to resurge the energy back in the audience, bringing a newer perspective to the intro of the song (“Do not attempt to leave the dancefloor / The DJ booth is conducting a troubleshoot test of the entire system”) that it’s nearly unfathomable to believe that the sound malfunction wasn’t intentional if clips of it didn’t exist.
For anyone who is keeping track of the dialogue, Beyoncé spends a lot of the word count giving flowers to her idols living before her career and to the ones supporting it. The album itself is a salute to her dedicated LGBTQ+ fans (especially the Black and trans dancers of the New York scene) and to the ’70s music that has contributed to the disco-tinged, sweaty-sensational vibes. The language of the lyrics were immediately welcomed and branded across homemade costumes and hedonistic self-declarations of confidence and cunty behavior, but audiences scream to names that come up like cameos: Uncle Johnny (a family friend who is mentioned in “Heated” and links Beyoncé’s closeness to the community), Grace Jones (who is featured in “Move”, but Beyoncé ad-libs her names a couple of times during the song as if she is summoning the spirit of the strut), pioneer of New Orleans bounce Big Freedia (recognizable for his voice in “Energy” and “Break My Soul”), Philly rapper Tierra Whack (who contributes to “My Power” but is namedropped in the “Vogue”/”Thique” remix). Fans are given some cheeky shout-outs in costuming and an offhand Austin Powers reference.
If it can be believed thus far, I’ve tried to cater a little bit of interest to the non-listener or the skeptic who might whip out the body count in songwriters behind “Bohemian Rhapsody” and “Run the World (Girls)”. Not because I think that everyone should watch Renaissance (as with most things, it does take an open heart and appreciation for performance), but because I wanted to hold back from going into the deep end of adoration. And without getting too into it, I can share that enough of her past live performances are etched into my retinal nerves that watching Beyoncé perform in Renaissance is as familiar as reflex. I know that she is about get into her raunchiest when she is sitting down (positions in this film include arching over a disco ball impaled by a stripper pole and lounging on a Birth of Venus-inspired shell). I know that her precise meter readings of her audience are indicated by the synchronization of her body movements to the bass drops, double-time beats, and silence when she knows that her fans will scream the lyrics back to her.
Since Donna Summer (who Beyoncé samples twice, in “Naughty Girl” and “Summer Renaissance”), there hasn’t been another voice in the pop landscape that has evoked vocal sultriness in cascades of crystallized arpeggios and dirty South growls like Beyoncé has. Like concerts before, she redefines the performer’s sexuality not based on clothes or provocative choreography, but in glances or ad-libbed whispers. (This is a good time to drop a quote from Kings of Leon lead singer Caleb Folowill when Beyoncé covered “Sex on Fire” at Glastonbury: “[She] made me masturbate to my own song.”) There is watching a dancer, there is hearing a singer, but to witness someone who has immaculate control over those skills on stage under a constructed vision — there is really nothing else like it.
Beyoncé, as you have it, is a bit of a goofball. We are often reminded in Renaissance that the Beyhive is alive and well; when the film cuts to fans uncontrollably crying, it is an accurate mirrored reaction to my audience in attending on opening night, who were in the tides between enjoyment and hysteria. Memes are acknowledged with varying attention spans, but all poke fun at the campiness and sometimes lunacy of fandom. In the famous audience interaction where the venue is supposed to be silent during a part in “Energy” (“Look around, everybody on mute”), the film cuts to a clip of Cardi B side-eying at a screaming crowd member, which broke our otherwise obliging audience. There is also a parental-woe scene where Blue Ivy, her eldest daughter, is fighting in the trenches to include “Diva” in the setlist. “Blue — NO,” Beyoncé firmly ends with that familiar maternal punctuation, right before the conversation interjects to her and her dancers in mid-“Diva”-performance. From a different artist, the projection of perfection might have been desired for something as large as this. But despite the futuristic, intergalactic themes and aesthetics, Renaissance is inspired by the hard work and joy of humanness.
There still haven’t been any plans of a Beyoncé trilogy (in the album announcement, Renaissance has been dubbed as ACT I), but when do we get to enjoy the now-rare anticipation of a sequel? To read about unconditional love is not the greatest review you can or should encounter, but the experience of attending something with the unchallenged expectation of loving it — I wish that feeling upon everyone.
Renaissance
2023
dir. Beyoncé
169 min.
Now playing at Coolidge Corner Theatre and cinemas everywhere
