The latest weapon in Sting's promotional arsenal is the documentary film Bring on the Night. Intended to be a refreshing change from the normal rock documentary, it chronicles a period of time during a band's formation, rather than during its height of popularity or its demise. Great idea, but director Michael Apted's (Coal Miner's Daughter, Firstborn) heavy-handed approach ruins the film's initial promise. The film was shot in Paris during a nine-day rehearsal period for the band's first shows, and although Apted manages to record some of the natural creative process, he fails to capture the true spontaneity of a band rehearsal situation accurately. There are very few screw-ups or flaring tempers to be found in the film, which I guess is intended to show the audience what a special group of people this is, but come on! No one is perfect, and assuming that the people in this movie are beyond fault strips them of all humanity.
The only person that shows the least bit of a bad side is Sting's manager, Miles Copeland, and he comes off looking like a raging jerk. The few appearances he makes in the film are the only spots where Apted does any real documentation.
Copeland stands revealed as a typical music business wheel, complete with all of the business-minded arrogance one might expect. The scene where he has a fight with costume designer Colleen Atwood over the fact that her designs are making the band look boring on stage is priceless footage providing real insight into the problems and egos involved in getting a roadshow together. Another of Apted's goals was to get inside of the people involved and reveal more than the average documentary would, and here he fails miserably. His on-camera interviews of band and entourage members are short and unrevealing, and don't tell us much that we don't already know. It would have been interesting to hear someone like Omar Hakim talk about his knowledge of and feeling for music, but what we get instead is each person speaking modestly of themselves, then highly of Sting.
It becomes apparent early on that Sting is the true focus of the film when his name appears in all capital letters before the film's title, but by film's end the congratulatory tone gets to be a bit much. Another irritant is the schizophrenic mixture of rhythmic and documentary style editing. It starts to look like a music video at several points, then, almost as if Apted has caught himself looking foolish, the rhythmic editing gets off-beat in the middle of a song and the cuts come further apart. This is something that an audience that wasn't particularly music-minded probably wouldn't notice, but given the nature of the film, it's a clumsy mistake. The most annoying feature film aspect of this documentary is the gratuitous use of music. I know, it's a movie about music, but the use of the sound track over words is not so much an accent, as a video-image way of manipulating emotions. The most blatant example of this deception is the use of the song Russians from Sting's current album, The Dream of the Blue Turtles. The song is concerned with children in the nuclear age and is melodically stirring. Take this song and blare it over the footage of the actual birth of Sting's son, Jake, after the second Paris concert and it makes the event overblown and trivial. It's a very emotional moment in the film, but the birth of a child is an event that dosen't need background music to have an impact.
This is Apted's fifth documentary, but he seems to have become too used to the traditional cinematic ploys for arousing sentiment to effectively separate the two styles. This is not to say that the two can't mix, but the entire film takes moments that stand just fine on their own merit and trivializes them by thundering Sting's music at sometimes obnoxious levels. Make no mistake - this is just as much a showcase for Sting's album as a documentary on his band's formation.
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