The New Yorker:

Beyoncé’s nearly three-hour-long concert film captures a grandiose affair, but it also has its own lofty aspirations.

By Carrie Battan

For the past decade, Beyoncé has been using documentary film to craft a narrative about herself in the absence of traditional press interviews and public appearances. Her films, which include “Life Is But a Dream” (2013) and “Homecoming” (2019), attempt to show audiences just how much labor is involved in the extraordinary job of being Beyoncé. In “Homecoming,” the Netflix documentary she released to supplement her historically ambitious 2018 Coachella performance, the brunt of the work on show was physical. “Homecoming” takes place months after Beyoncé gave birth to twins, and emphasizes just how brutal the diet, training, and choreography regimen that she undertook leading up to such an ambitious production was. In a voice-over that accompanies footage of her struggling through a piece of choreography, she says, “I had to rebuild my body from cut muscles. . . . In order for me to meet my goal, I’m limiting myself to no bread, no carbs, no sugar, no dairy, no meat, no fish, no alcohol. And I’m hungry.” Then she explains that she has learned a valuable lesson: “I will never, never push myself that far again.”

“Renaissance,” the superstar performer’s new concert film, which draws on footage of a global tour Beyoncé commenced in May this year and completed in October, shows the artist making good on that promise. The tour issues from her 2022 album of the same name, a dance record born out of a need to escape the ennui and claustrophobia of the pandemic’s prime time. As a paean to underground house and disco scenes and queer communities of the eighties and nineties, the album might have been Beyoncé’s most physical. But in the film, viewers see comparatively little of the elaborate, athletic choreography that has defined Beyoncé’s presence in so many of her other projects. Onstage, she uses dancers and set design to create movement, while she often sits, calm and regal, at the center of the storm. It’s a choice that allows her true gifts to shine through. Given the size of Beyoncé’s cultural footprint, it can be easy to forget that the forty-two-year-old is, at her core, a once-in-a-generation vocalist, but the film foregrounds this fact in delightful ways. It opens not with a rousing medley or cinematic intro but with a block of ballads that finds her trilling toward the limits of her vocal range.

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