Bring the Soul: The Movie

A tour documentary. BTS are finishing their European tour. The film begins after the last concert, on a rooftop in Paris. Seven people sit down at a table. They eat, drink and talk about the tour; the film uses that conversation as its frame. From the conversation it goes back. Each city is a separate section; London, Amsterdam, Berlin, Paris. Backstage is shown. Rehearsal, warming up, costume, injury and rest. One member is injured on stage. His leg hurts, he sees a doctor, and whether he will continue the concert is discussed. Another talks. He describes the pressure he feels going on, the size of the crowd, and how it wears him down. What the narrative is interested in is not success but exhaustion: the film looks less at the grandeur of the concert than at the emptiness afterwards. In one scene a member says this: having grown this large, he does not know what to do next, and there are moments when he is not happy. The tour footage is extensive. The stadium scenes, the crowd and the lighting design are shown in detail. The structure is loose. The narrative makes no claim to be a documentary; it is a record assembled from the group's own archive. This is one of the group's films shown in cinemas and it stayed on release for a limited period. The camera crew is the group's own and there is no outside view. RM, Jin, SUGA, j-hope, Jimin, V and Jung Kook are on stage. Park Jun-soo directed. Who it is for: anyone who follows the group and likes backstage records. Who it is not for: anyone expecting an independent portrait; the film is entirely the group's own production and is nowhere critical.