Infinity and Bey-ond: RENAISSANCE

Beyoncé is the auteur of Beyoncé. She’s the director, on screen and off. Her public persona has been tightly controlled as she’s been able to consolidate all that power herself. She makes music, yes—among the catchiest of pulse-pounding danceable pop and soaring melodic ballads this century. But she’s also fashionable, political, and historical, alive and aware to her continuity as a brand, as a person, and as the latest in a long lineage of cultural figures. She’s an icon and knows it. Ever since she started directing her own film projects, she’s more or less stopped giving interviews. Her movies are the message. Think of the stirring visual album Lemonade, and the echoes in the similar project Black is King, engaged with a fluidity of persona in conversation with the solid truths of Black womanhood in America and in diaspora. Her Homecoming captured her career capstone Coachella performance—her own Eras-spanning set—clad in the garbs of Bey-centric Greek-life sweatshirts and short-shorts riffing on looks from Historically Black Colleges and Universities, complete with a brassy marching band and rat-a-tat drumline for backup. Throughout, these cinematic works prove Beyoncé has a keen directorial eye, staging eye-popping images and resonant symbolism with the same layered pleasures she brings to her music. She knows how to pose, how to style, how to draw the eye, and make it all swell with meaning. She’s cultivating an image, to be sure. But just when we might start wondering about the slick elisions (she's strangely vague about the "difficult times" we've been through lately; supply your own cultural context, I guess), the music starts pumping again—the thudding, insistent, endless beat booming with the force of subwoofer in your rib cage and begging you to bust a move.

When it comes to Renaissance, a rebirth into a self-proclaimed looser, freer Beyoncé, and a shared space for her fans to celebrate themselves in the presence of her self, she’s building on all she’s shown before with a new openness. It’s still brand management. The modern star on her level is also a corporation, after all. But here she’s more willing than ever to show us the whole ecosystem it takes to help her look and sound this good. And how hard she’ll fight for her vision. The spine of the movie is a loud, energetic capture of her latest tour—a massive arena undertaking bringing her latest album to the stage. Throughout she threads behind-the-scenes vignettes. We see rehearsals, meet backup dancers and singers, technicians on stage and off. We see her family—none cuter than her kids mimicking her dance moves from some anonymous room behind the show. She talks about her inspirations, about growing up, references moments from her career. We see archival footage, sometimes popping as flashes of memory echoing a big hit—a glimpse of filming the “Crazy in Love” music video, of TV appearances, of a little girl dancing in the backyard. Look where I’ve been, she seems to be saying. And look what I can do now—a mature artist fully embodied in herself and comfortable with what she can bring and say to the world.

This all deepens and enriches the experience of the main event. She’s a performer of remarkable consistency. It’s a show of sweat and energy and propulsive dancing and soaring vocals. The fashions are elaborate—and with a myriad of costume changes even between shows, and she loves showing that off with satisfying match cuts between nights revealing new stunning outfits, a Homecoming trick oft and well repeated here to more elaborate effect. She’s in full control, even when celebrating a concert and album, and her house music tribute within, that pounds with a sweaty club beat dripping in modes of shimmery disco and drag ballrooms and girl groups—all manner of eclectic and authentic tastes synthesized in a style all her own. The concert itself embraces the contradictions of Beyoncé. She’s somehow fresh and retro. She’s a soft-spoken private person and a brilliantly loud show-off performer. She’s a pneumatic technical hard-edged Afro-futurist precision machine—literal digital robots tower on video screens over her in snaky glows. And she’s a warm, soft, organic mother imbued with and empowered by a rich cultural heritage. She’s a vulgar, earthy sensualist and a shimmering spiritual beacon of pure love. She’s a bootylicious twerker and a beatific familial homebody. She’s a benign cult leader unto herself and totemic conduit for bigger ideas outside herself. Renaissance—the movie, the tour, the album—doesn’t resolve these tensions, but expresses them, explodes them, explores them. And it has that huge walloping beat urging us to pop ecstatics.

Painting Pictures of Paradise: BLACK IS KING

Beyoncé’s new film Black is King comes to us wrapped in the guise of a vague retelling of The Lion King, but that’s a simple way of stating the case, and just one element at play here. It’s more a string of sensational images and sounds—a feature-length visual album pouring out a proud celebration of the African diaspora, of Black creativity, exuberantly assembled in one eye-boggling music video after the next. Unlike Lemonade, her 2016 masterwork in which the personal and the political tightly intertwine in an allusive crescendo of pain and grace, there’s less of a narrative or emotional throughline at play in this new effort—even losing, for most of the back half, a thin motif of references to Simba’s story, including interpolated lines from James Earl Jones and others. It trades its conceit for an eruption of kaleidoscopic imagination. Like Lemonade, it studiously brings an album’s worth of songs to life in indelible visual creation. It, too, is strung along by Warsan Shire poetry coolly recited in hushed tones over a hodgepodge mixture of film stocks and shooting styles freely intercut. These shots, flowing with energy, show us a cavalcade of colorful choreography in stunning backdrops both real (stunning African vistas) and unreal (fantastical sets and CG extensions). It’s abstract and concrete— at times Koyaanisqatsi by way of Khalik Allah.

This may not have the focus and power of her earlier film, but Black is King has scope and eclecticism, just as likely to have Jay-Z rolling up in a leopard-print convertible as it is to look down on a line of blue-painted men carrying a spare white coffin across a pure-white space or a lone figure nearly lost in a drone shot of endless dunes. Drawn from The Gift, her 2019 album much better than Jon Favreau’s ill-conceived photo-real Lion King remake that was ostensibly its inspiration, the songs are a swirling mix of funky Afro-pop grooves, tribal drums, swaggering hip-hop, soulful R&B phrasing, and soaring Gospel choirs. They overflow with love for the act of creativity that birthed them, their subjects ("Brown Skin Girl" saying "They'll never take 'My Power'"), and the generosity of Beyoncé in being both ringmaster and host, the center of attention and the one inviting others to share in the spectacle.

She invites into the sequences a number of guest artists (Yemi Alade, Shatta Wale, Wizkid) and cameos (Lupita N’yongo, Kelly Rowland, family members), trading verses and ceding center frame to dancers echoing, incorporating, and conquering everything from Disney's animated big cat classic to Esther Williams aquatic ballets, from Hype Williams high-contrast, high-gloss videos to Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria’s Volk. They pose with Busby Berkeley symmetry or spring with loose-limbed alacrity. The fashions and style are similarly vibrant mashups donned with easy charm and effortlessly effortful beauty: blaxploitation fringes and Nefertiti hair, tribal face paint and rainbow leotards. We see rooms filled with geometric black-and-white-print prosceniums, a hearse lit up like a party bus, a basket floating down the river. We see a seaside baptism, a star field crossfade with old kings, a large snake slither up shoulders.

Throughout it all, Beyoncé is Earth-mother, spiritual advisor, sensual appreciator, tableaux icon, Queen. Her character shifts, but her presence is constant. On screen, she dominates, sharing space without conceding her point, inhabiting her frames. It’s a film full of her talent, yes, but also love for her collaborators, and for Blackness as a creative energy. Behind the scenes, she’s marshaling a small army of directors, cinematographers, and stylists. She's in total control of a film that's alternately moving, hypnotic, and overwhelmingly all over the place. Once again she’s made a film in which she gathers up the past represented in these layers of influence, and points a way toward a future reformed in the spirit of love and music. It’s self-mythology as world art, free-floating signifiers caught in the orbit of Beyoncé in all her glory.

Get in Formation: LEMONADE

Beyoncé’s Lemonade is a masterpiece. The hour-long film, which she directed along with six co-directors including Kahlil Joseph (m.A.A.d.) and Mark Romanek (Never Let Me Go), had a surprise debut on HBO this past Saturday, an electrifying and overwhelming event revealing a collision of pop art and high art, music video and experimental cinema. It’s a deeply personal and political film, dense with flowing allusion and lively imagery, smooth dancing and tough subjects, magical realism and serious contemplation, intimate poetry and provocative juxtapositions. Rich and sparkling eclecticism, it draws inspiration appreciatively from a strong tradition of black women artists – Nina Simone, Julie Dash, Kasi Lemmons, Toni Morrison, Claudia Rankine, and more – to create the feeling of its auteur – one of the most famous pop stars of this century – expressing an evolution, a culmination, and a synthesis. She is possible because of those who came before, building on all that got her here.

She began as pop perfection in group Destiny’s Child and in an excellent solo career. With this film she’s delivered her richest and most emotionally and politically engaged work. She continues playing with and sharpening her craft while opening up and revealing innermost thoughts, fears, and hopes. For a celebrity whose privacy is so closely guarded and whose image is so rigorously managed, it feels like nothing less than a revelation. Filmed in a variety of styles, stocks, and aspect ratios, cutting between them with evocative metaphor and a beautifully intuitive coherent structure, it is continual astonishment. Told in poetry, by Somali-British writer Warsan Shire, and song, going track by track through Beyoncé’s terrifically diverse new album of the same name, we follow a woman who discovers her husband is cheating on her.

First she looks dazed in a field while wearing a black hoodie, next giving us a melancholy look from on a stage, then in a bathtub. Then she’s despondent, jumping off a building (echoes of Beyond the Lights?), the concrete turning into an ocean in which she tries to starve herself. Then she gets angry – strutting out of an austere building ahead of a flood, smashing a baseball bat into windows and, later, driving a monster truck over parked cars, the reggae-beat lyrics wondering, “What’s worse, looking jealous or crazy?” She descends into her anger, as the film gathers bewitching horror movie portent, empty parking garages and eerie black-and-white covens coming before fire and long dark red hallways. Each section of the film is marked by chapter headings, guiding us from “Intuition,” “Denial,” and “Anger,” to this lowest point: “Emptiness.”

But she doesn’t stop there. She gets better, grows stronger, reconnecting with her past and with others like her who have struggled with problems of their own. She moves to “Forgiveness,” “Resurrection,” “Hope,” and a transcendent “Redemption,” as forceful dance music, gloomy blues, and jangly country with moody, mysterious imagery transforms into tender melancholy ballads accompanied by more pastoral sights, lakes and fields, sun-dappled solidarity and romance. (This is where her husband, Jay Z, is revealed slowly, in soft light, cuddling. Is this amnesty or are they playing parts?) She finds the power to forgive within herself, as an act of radical self-confident empowerment, and within her cultural context and in her womanhood, finding strength in numbers, a comfort in knowing that it is not her fate to suffer alone or in silence.

We see women throughout, arranged separately in striking tableau – in nature or in empty urban spaces, cheering her on or standing silent – but then increasingly together, until Beyoncé leads them towards a better tomorrow, striding across water, breaking bread together. We often return to the image of black women in angelic white clothing standing at Southern plantations or on beaches at sunset. (Daughters of the Dust is a clear reference point here.) Early on we hear the voice of Malcolm X saying, “The most disrespected person in America is the black woman. The most unprotected person in America is the black woman. The most neglected person in America is the black woman.” Later we’re shown mothers of recent victims of police brutality – Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Oscar Grant – staring into the camera as they hold framed photographs of their sons. The personal is political, and Beyoncé is here presenting a personal, professional, and political metamorphosis, moving from profound anger at deep betrayal to a serene hope for the future.

Because Lemonade moves so poetically and intuitively through the stages of emotional healing and political engagement, its rapturous fusion enacts the very reckoning at its core. In the film, Beyoncé inhabits the persona of a woman who has been wronged, who is hurt, and who sees her pain on a historical continuum. There’s profound intersection between images playing off her stardom and off the history of black Americans, like when she stretches out on the Superdome’s field – location of her 2013 Superbowl Halftime Show, and the infamous “shelter of last resort” during Hurricane Katrina. The film turns on an acknowledgement of history and matriarchal lineage, summoning allusion for help upending racist and sexist ideology, allowing love to conquer all. She begins the film deeply wounded, but in exorcising her inner torment, weighing a legacy of ancestral pain, she can emerge whole, able to imagine a utopian vision. She surrounds herself with a community of black women, some celebrity (like Serena Williams, Quvenzhané Wallis, and Zendaya), others not. They stand strong together, support one another, and build a peaceable sisterhood.

Can we build a better future off a legacy of pain? When she intones, “Nothing real can be threatened,” having moved from righteous anger to transcendent forgiveness, launching into a soaring ballad of true love’s transformative absolution, turning the lemons of grief into striking lemonade, it feels like the truth. In the final moments she drops the artifice and cuts in home videos – of her wedding, her pregnancy, and candid dancing with daughter Blue Ivy. It’s a peek behind the curtain, and a stirring expression of selfhood, a perfect conclusion to this interior journey vibrantly and densely expressed. What a wondrous and exciting film, as deeply moving as it is deeply felt, alive with pop’s expressive possibilities and cinema’s irresistible power. It has a beat to dance to, a sensitive emotional narrative to feel, a potent poetic collage of sound and image to get lost in, and an overpowering catharsis as it all comes together.

Small Stuff: EPIC

The creators of the computer animated fantasy Epic created an intriguing fantasy world and failed to have anything interesting happen in it. The film imagines a society of bug-sized people living in the forest locked in a battle between the forces of growth and the armies of decay. Growth is represented by plant people, basically human shaped beings with toadstool heads or leafy limbs, who are protected by the brave Leafmen soldiers and bow to their beautiful forest queen (voiced by Beyoncé, pop royalty). Decay is represented by snarling hordes of grey-skinned creepers led into battle by their leader (Christoph Waltz). This potentially interesting world is the staging ground for simple fantasy storytelling at its most basic and predictable. It has a plot in which one-dimensional characters fight over a magical gee-gaw for some time and then it all ends in a big battle. Reluctant heroes find their destiny, outsiders become insiders, and good defeats evil. It’s all very tired.

I would imagine this is what a hypothetical American remake of a Miyazaki film would look like. It has a young girl for a protagonist (Amanda Seyfried), a normal human who is suddenly shrunk down to Leafman size and gets involved in the magical conflict. It has ecological themes that are occasionally prone to acknowledging that growth and decay need to be held in balance. It has a casual beauty to its imagined tiny world in which plants can be controlled with a wave of the forest queen’s hand. And yet, what seems so promising about all of the above is ground into a homogenized bore. A potentially lovely protagonist is turned into nothing more than honorary buddy to a stoic warrior (Colin Farrell) and token love interest to the warrior’s protégé (Josh Hutcherson). The environmental message is reducible to a good versus evil bumper sticker instead of recognition of nature’s natural order. And the animation, though technically proficient, is blandly obvious and overfamiliar.

Rather than take advantage of the potential in the world it creates, a world borrowed from a book by William Joyce, who has his name all over the credits (he’s co-writer, producer, and production designer), it simply coasts on formula. Indeed, the bulk of the imagination seems to have fallen to the casting, which finds surprisingly weird choices of voices to fill the supporting roles. Distinctive sounding comedians Aziz Ansari and Chris O’Dowd show up as comic relief slugs. (I found them more of a distraction, but maybe little kids will like them.) Rapper Pitbull plays a thug of a frog, an amphibian who for some reason sports a suit coat. Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler plays a shaman caterpillar named Nim Galuu (I just had to give you the name) who is so much a showman I thought for sure he was a charlatan. Not so, though. He’s just more weirdly comic support for the otherwise humorlessly serious rehashing of basic fantasy plot points.

In yet another missed opportunity, what with Beyoncé and Tyler and, okay, Pitbull in the cast, the film doesn’t even give us a good song to hum on the way out of the theater. In the end, there’s simply nothing to remember the movie by at all. Directed by Chris Wedge and produced by Blue Sky, the man and the company behind the largely forgettable and yet wildly successful Ice Age movies, I suppose I’m glad they’re trying something different. This isn’t just another lazily formulaic, pop-culture referencing, manic kids’ flick. Instead, it’s a lazily formulaic, mildly serious, boring kids’ flick. I certainly didn’t hate it. The colors are soothing, the motion smooth, and the comfortingly familiar structure has a lulling quality to it. All it lacks is a reason to care.