This year marks the 20th anniversary of the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, aka Coachella. It was established in 1999. It's mostly known as being a huge concert in the desert just outside Los Angeles. This concert film is about last year's Coachella. The 2018 festival had Beyoncé as its headlining act. Beyoncé is the 37-year-old, R&B, hip hop and pop star who is a
Grammy-winning, multi-platinum, recording artist and powerful, worldwide
celebrity. She was actually invited to perform at the 2017 festival, but she had to cancel it or at least postpone. When she did finally perform at last year's event, she became the first African-American woman to headline Coachella. Her show paid tribute to HBCU or historically black colleges and universities like Howard University or Texas Southern. She's from Houston, Texas. This concert film specifically focuses on Beyoncé's entire set, which was dubbed as the portmanteau "Beychella." The film along with the set was all conceived and directed by Beyoncé.
The set consists of over 30 songs from Beyoncé's six studio albums. It also includes a couple of songs from when she was in Destiny's Child, the girl group, which formed in 1997. The two other singers from that group even joins her on stage briefly. The same is true for Beyoncé's sister, Solange, as well as her husband and rapper, Jay-Z. The concert is nearly two hours, and it seems as if she performed the whole thing twice, perhaps on multiple nights. Those multiple performances are inter-cut together. She interrupts chunks or swaths of songs with backstage footage of her preparing or rehearsing, as well as planning her performance. She also has spoken word narration that provides some insight into her process or even slightly into her personal life.
That backstage footage will satisfy fans of Beyoncé, but it's not as insightful or invasive of her personal life as documentaries such as
Amy (2015),
What Happened, Miss Simone? (2015) or
Whitney (2018). Those movies have the benefit of their subjects being dead, so they can be more insightful or invasive. Here, Beyoncé is directing and is in full control of this project, so nothing will be in it that she doesn't want, which would mean real peeks behind the curtain into her personal life, specifically that of her marriage, which has been the object of controversy and allegedly the object of inspiration for her album
Lemonade (2016).
Most of the music documentaries I've enjoyed do give us real peeks behind the curtain into an artist's personal life. They do delve into controversy in honest and frank ways. Some examples include
Metallica: Some Kind of Monster (2004), which showed us the rivalry within that band.
The Devil and Daniel Johnston (2006) showed us the mental illness plaguing the titular musician.
Shut Up & Sing (2006) showed us the blacklisting of the Dixie Chicks within country music. Beyoncé's film doesn't do that. The backstage footage indicates the dedication, thought and passion she puts into her work that might conflict with her duties as a mother or wife. There is a difficult balancing act there, even if one is super-rich as she and her husband is, but that's only briefly touched upon and certainly not with any kind of depth.
However, a concert film doesn't have to have that kind of depth to be successful. A concert film simply has to capture the events happening on stage in a good way like
Gimme Shelter (1970) or
Sign o' the Times (1987). In that, this film is a success. From the design of the stage, which is a pyramid of school bleechers to the choreography, which was inspired by the steppers of black fraternities to the inclusion of marching bands, every beat and every move are shown to us with such polish and perfection. The full songs and medleys are impeccably done too with a round robin of all her hits, so it's a jam-packed party from beginning to end.
Rated TV-MA.
Running Time: 2 hrs. and 17 mins.
Available on Netflix.
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