Review: Beyoncé marks time with her filmed Renaissance
Movie stars are no longer revered as gods. In the silent era, fans slit their wrists upon learning of the death of Rudolph Valentino, and Greta Garbo was the “Swedish Sphinx” – the highest-paid woman in the world, whose reclusive behavior only fueled audiences’ fascination with her grand, somber screen persona.
In the latter half of the twentieth century, and now especially in the twenty-first, movie actors have become far more pedestrian. The proliferation of talk shows, reality TV, and social media has made these people anything but obscure; they are cultural participants as much as we are, and stardom has lost most of its unobtainable edge. Heck, if your latest TikTok blows up, you yourself may become a “star,” or celebrity, overnight.
The closest thing we have to a Garbo or Valentino nowadays is Beyoncé. She occupies a unique space in popular culture, such that she is at once ubiquitous and utterly inaccessible. From her early years in Destiny’s Child to her mid-aughts juggling of pop records and Hollywood blockbusters to her mid-career, self-managed ascension into a stratosphere of top-selling world tours backed by renowned visual-albums, she is, in every measurable way, a superstar. (Or, if you please, an alien superstar.)
And she keeps to herself. If everyone loves her, and if, for many of us in the BeyHive, our regard for Beyoncé verges on deification, it is because she is so good at, among other things, withholding any flaws or contentious personal qualities from curious eyes. One of Ms. Garbo’s famed peculiarities was her requirement that, while on set, she be surrounded by a wall of tall black slats. This was to prevent anyone other than her cameraman from seeing her.
When asked why she found this necessary, Garbo explained: "If I am by myself, my face will do things I cannot do with it otherwise."
I suspect that Ms. Knowles-Carter is of a similar mind – which goes a long way to explaining why even Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé, her fifth directorial effort and a behind-the-scenes documentation of her tour from earlier this year, comes across as a deliberate, careful positioning of filtered glimpses into its subject-creator’s life.
Most of the documentary is centered on Beyoncé’s live performances of the Renaissance concert: beginning with a set of lush ballads – standing alone onstage, draped in flowing gowns in red, yellow, and blue, before legions of screaming admirers – she transitions to a series of muscular dances in eclectically-designed leotards, accompanied by some of her greatest hits (“Crazy In Love,” “Get Me Bodied,” “Run the World”), all while singing every song from the album for which the tour is named.
But in between these musical acts, Renaissance dips into vignettes that highlight key aspects of Knowles-Carter’s private life. These include voiceovers of Beyoncé expressing her gratitude for all the labor that goes on backstage at her shows; reflections on her cultural roots as a native of Houston, Texas; pride at the efforts of her eldest child, Blue Ivy, who performed nightly during the tour; and the memory of her “Uncle Jonny,” an older, gay cousin whose familiarity with house music and death from AIDS inspired Beyoncé to create her latest album.
It’s all very nice, and the interplay of personal observations with music and dance numbers makes the concert itself a far more stimulating, enjoyable event, I imagine, than it would have been in person. I’ve heard plenty of praise for the Renaissance Tour from people who went to see it – all of them awestruck, professing that it amounted to a “spiritual” experience. But the thing is, I remember folks using that same word to describe the Formation World Tour just over seven years ago; I attended the final night of that tour, and was distinctly underwhelmed.
What makes Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé work so well is the fact that it’s a movie. A seemingly endless variety in camera angles – plus breakneck edits between closeups and wide shots – transports viewers to the center of Knowles-Carter’s stage. One is fully immersed, and granted a comprehensive vantage point that is in no way an accurate representation of what it is like to witness an arena concert.
No matter how well-choreographed, no matter how well-conceived, no matter how well-dressed – Beyoncé at a stadium is like an ant on the side of a tree. Unless you’re standing really close, or have a magnifying glass (i.e. jumbotron), there is no reason to stare for two and a half hours.
Of course, I recognize that my identity as a white man may have molded my reality to the point where seeing a powerful Black woman thriving in her element doesn’t mean the same thing to me as it would to many other people. However, I’m still a huge fan. And I’ve had, if not spiritual, then intensely cathartic or moving experiences at other concerts (e.g. Rihanna, SZA, Jonathan Richman). So I trust my judgment.
The highly mechanized flow of Knowles-Carter’s shows lends itself to cinema much better than it does to a seventy-thousand seat, outdoor sporting venue. If there’s anything lacking about Beyoncé as a live performer, it’s that she’s too choreographed. The regimen to which she subjects herself and those around her is, apparently, maintained in the interest of giving her fans what they want – but the trouble with planning every second of stagetime is that it leaves no room for spontaneity.
It should come as no surprise that Beyoncé allows herself little to no opportunity to organically engage with her audience. I suspect that the euphoria people feel at her concerts is simply an emotion that’s consistent with encountering one’s idol. And the last thing you want to hear yourself say after spending four hundred dollars on a ticket is: “I guess that was okay.”
The truth is, it is in Ms. Knowles-Carter’s interest to remain elusive. Not only does it exacerbate her fans’ crushing desire to receive any spare trace of her presence, but it shields them from some of her less-than-impressive characteristics. And try as she might to frame herself appealingly in the Renaissance movie, the alien superstar unveils a handful of otherworldly quirks, or glitches in calculation.
For instance, Beyoncé talks at length about her own personal “strength,” her “endurance,” and the “sacrifices” she has made to produce the Renaissance World Tour. Of course, I’m sure that the process is taxing, to say the least, and in the documentary, there is one brief, striking incident where she challenges a tour technician (significantly, a white man), who, it seems, is lying about the impossibility of finding a wider camera lens.
“The thing is,” Beyoncé says, “I looked it up, and a wider lens does exist.”
It’s slight, this moment, but it speaks to what must be decades of a Black woman being told that she’s unreasonable or unrealistic. That much of Beyoncé’s journey is sympathetic, as is her childood in Houston, which the Renaissance film acknowledges with a few clips from old home videos. You sit with the recognition that the Knowles family, like so many other Black people in the United States, aspired to some measure of socioeconomic comfort. It is touching to consider just how far their eldest daughter’s successes, or “sacrifices” have taken them.
But the sympathy ends when we remember that Beyoncé is a billionaire. She is wealthy to the point where she is part of the problem that, according to her own lyrics, America has. Her feverish devotion to putting on a good show is not a life-and-death scenario; she is a perfectionist, and it is entirely possible that there are moments when she is unreasonable with hardworking, less-than-six-figures-earning members of her staff.
“I have nothing left to prove,” Beyoncé muses at one point in the film. If that’s the case, I find myself asking, why does she behave the way that she does? Why make this documentary? Between bragging about her own stamina, highlighting her charity work, and gushing about the importance of family, it seems as though Beyoncé, the director, is just as desperate to hit her marks as is Beyoncé, the performer.
A notable illustration of this is how Beyoncé represents her relationship with her children. In Homecoming, Knowles-Carter’s prior documentary, about her performance at Coachella in 2018, there were distressing passages that showed the singer-dancer taking brief breaks from hours of rehearsals to visit with her infant twins. In voiceover, she refects on how her body “wants” to be with the babies – but she pushes through these urges, determined to recreate her pre-pregnancy physique in time for the concert. (It was held ten months after she gave birth.)
Almost as if to make up for this missed period of their lives – or, perhaps, to recuperate her image – in Renaissance, Beyoncé claims that spending time with her children is her “top priority.” She describes taking them to school in the morning and tucking them into bed at night; she shares snippets of videos that show twins Rumi and Sir jumping around in bed sheets and frolicking in a pool. And Tina, Beyoncé’s mother, recounts how, after one show on the Renaissance Tour, Oprah Winfrey and Gail King met with the Knowles-Carters backstage and remarked how they were “like a normal family.”
First of all, it’s not a little hilarious that anyone would take Oprah’s word regarding what qualifies as “normal.” No less hilarious is the fact that it wouldn’t occur to Ms. Winfrey how any family, no matter how famous, might put their best foot forward if they knew she’d be gracing them with her industry-titan presence. And furthermore, it’s downright farcical (or tragic?) to hear in Tina Knowles’ earnest recollection just how performative, or just how eager-to-please every single person in that room must have been – to be so eagerly clinging to validation, or to be so eagerly dishing it out.
Beyoncé can tell us all she wants that being a parent is the most important thing in her life, yet the keenest testament to her parenting style comes about fifteen minutes into Renaissance: sitting in a room with collaborators, overwhelmed and in need of sleep, Knowles-Carter holds her face in her hands. From across the room, we can hear Blue Ivy call out, in an alarmed voice:
“Mom, please! You need to rest! You’re working too hard.”
When one’s children become one’s chaperones, or step in to keep track of their parent’s well-being, that’s when you know that the wrong person stands at the center of their family. Of course, this is one fragmented moment out of a daily domestic reality, and I recognize that everyone’s style of parenting is different; however, it is easy to imagine that Blue Ivy has learned how to talk to her mother from the hordes of people who constantly surround and placate her. When your parent is busy “sacrificing,” or “enduring,” or being “strong,” there’s nothing more for you to do than stand quietly by, and worry about them.
All of this is to say that the contradictions of Ms. Beyoncé Knowles-Carter run aplenty, and self-awareness may be a lot to ask from a person who’s been living as a rich, fêted lady most of her life. Throughout the Renaissance movie, and in promotion of her album, Beyoncé has repeatedly referred to the project as a “safe space” – ostensibly an allusion to the queer community that inspired it, and its collective need for protective, nurturing environments.
How strange, then, to remember that before launching her tour, in January of this year, Beyoncé held a private concert in Dubai. It was to celebrate the opening of a luxury hotel, and she was reportedly paid twenty-four million dollars. Did it occur to her that there was something sinister about performing queer-themed songs in a country where homosexuality is illegal?
Perhaps she thought she was being defiant. Or perhaps, for Knowles-Carter, Dubai is as much a “safe space” (i.e., a space of flattery) as one of her concerts.
Very few artists have meant as much to me in my life as Beyoncé, and so I regard her progress with the watchful gaze of an equestrian who wants to make sure his promising young mare successfully clears the jumps. She is a defining cultural figure of our time, and Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé marks her status without volunteering any especially revelatory or groundbreaking material. It is thrilling to watch her up there, on a big screen: her luminous skin, her cascading hair. Her reassuring smile and Grecian figure. Her superhuman charisma.
All of that is enough to make a person kill themselves – or, at the very least, keep watching.
