That half actually takes up more than half of the film.
Made up of gorgeously shot and immaculately edited footage taken onstage during the Renaissance concerts in Europe and the US, the concert film gets fans and casual viewers alike falling dangerously in love with Beyonce.
To say the show is spectacular is an understatement: it’s massively spectacular. The set is gargantuan, with a full LED screen backdrop reaching several stories high and almost the entire width of the narrow side of a stadium.
It would’ve been compelling had the film somehow shown the aftermath of the bashing and the growth in her performances. But the offstage Renaissance is all tell, no show.
More impressive is the big round sliding panel smack in the middle that opens up to reveal different things at different points in the two hours-plus show—a tiered mini stage, a stylish shiny silver military-esque tank, a giant mirror ball horse statue, to name some.
Beyonce is never not on that LED wall. Either she’s being beamed live while performing onstage or a video of her images using photos or digital animation is being flashed during interstitial breaks while she goes for costume change backstage.
Renaissance, the film, is totally dazzling, magnetic, and awe-inspiring the whole time Beyonce the vocal dynamo, powerhouse dancer, fierce fashion plate, and overall stage diva is on.
But it also means to further propagate the Beyonce mythology and thus devotes a considerable amount of its 2-hour-38-minute running time to offstage footage that carries a direct commentary from the star herself explaining not only the show’s journey from inception through to execution but also narrating the story of her now-legendary 27-year career.
It goes, format-wise, by the playbook Madonna created for the industry in 1991 with her groundbreaking and seminal Truth or Dare film documentary for her equally groundbreaking and seminal Blond Ambition concert tour from the year before. Renaissance, however, forgoes what made Truth indelible — its raw energy, its frankness, its adventurousness, its fearlessness, and, well, its very daring to present a (largely) unfiltered portrait of the superstar offstage under the camera as microscope.
Instead, Beyonce, who also wrote and directed the film, offers a scripted narration over footage of mostly generic and uneventful backstage moments devoid of any drama, conflict, surprise, and palpable emotions. Viewers hoping to finally catch even a glimpse of the person behind Queen Bee—music’s impenetrable, indestructible, irreplaceable superwoman who has everything figured out and is in total control—will come away disappointed.
Not that the film is without any potentially revealing moments. An early sequence involves a sudden power outage on the stage midway through a heavily choreographed production number, which sends the star of the show and her dancers making an unscheduled exit. This comes right after a documentary segment where Beyonce says the show took four years to put together and stresses how elaborately and intricately interconnected all elements of the show are.
It’s a setup for what could’ve been the film’s first off-the-cuff personality moment for Beyonce but the moment never comes. After a short clip of her and her dancers in her dressing room chatting fret-free as though nothing had interrupted their rigidly rehearsed routine during an actual performance, everything goes promptly back to onstage business the moment power gets restored.
In a later segment devoted to daughter Blue Ivy, who makes her debut as a dancer on Renaissance, Beyonce talks about how the 11-year-old received negative comments online for her first-ever performance on the tour. Mama Bey goes on to say, proudly, that the bashing did not bring Blue Ivy down.
Instead it actually fueled her more to be a better performer. Back onstage for another performance, Beyonce introduces her daughter as “the legendary Blue Ivy” and the young star proceeds to perform. The segment ends backstage with Bey and Jay-Z telling their daughter how proud they are of her.
It would’ve been compelling had the film somehow shown the aftermath of the bashing and the growth in her performances. But the offstage Renaissance is all tell, no show.
So when Beyonce says, at the very end of the film, that she “feels liberated” and has “transitioned into a new animal” viewers remain clueless about the process and what kind of animal she is now. Despite an amazing haf, this renaissance feels more heard than earned.
