First sighted in the 1960s and 1970s, the concert film has enjoyed something of a resurgence in recent years, especially once producers clicked to how defiantly dedicated fans of teen stars such as Miley Cyris (Hannah Montana & Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert) and Justin Bieber (Justin Bieber: Never Say Never) were to their idols; the talent has got younger as the audiences have got bigger. It’s been a profitable merging of music and film (certainly more profitable than having musicians act) and the simple size of the cinema experience has proven welcome in trying to recreate the concert for those not there on the night in question.
Highly successful Taiwanese band, Mayday, who’ve sold millions of albums across Asia since their inception in 1997, offer their own 3D take on the form with Mayday 3DNA, a tricked up version of their 2010 Asian tour, which filled arenas and outdoor stadiums in a succession of countries, while also bringing them to Australia for introductory shows. Neatly segmented, the film alternates concert footage from gigs in their homeland, Singapore, China and Hong Kong with three fictional vignettes tied to tickets for a Shanghai gig.
The concert footage (the lyrics, like the three shorts are subtitled) is an exercise in scale; the camera takes in row after row of excited fans, whose use of day-glo wands and crosses creates a vast field of depth for the 3D format. To highlight the technology post-production additions include, at one point and for reason unknown, an asteroid field, but the band’s performances are calmly professional, running through a greatest hits set with three song brackets dividing the shorts.
The bright garage pop of their early material gives way to grandiloquent ballads of devotion and ever more involved arrangements (the stage is large enough to host an orchestra as necessary). While pop lyrics don’t always translate when removed from music, especially in a second language, the slavish dedication that has vocalist Ashin singing, 'With you my heart thumps unbearably hard", sums up their earnest appeal.
But for all the emotional outpouring, the film never delves behind the scenes or gets to grips with the band members. Apart from droll cameos in the vignettes, there’s no digression from their polished stage personas. Written and directed by Wen Yen Kung, the trio of tales offers a Mayday concert as an answer, whether to a brattish child obsessed with the band or a pair of brokenhearted adults who find themselves sharing a taxi. They’re lightweight tales, as goodhearted as the band’s songs, but more of a diversion than an addition, serving simply to remind you that the choices we make in popular culture are hard to explain, but deeply satisfying on an emotional level.
Concert films are aimed at devoted followers, and Mayday 3DNA is no different, with fans sure to be delighted at the spectacle, even if the substance is limited to their songbook. Newcomers may be bemused and intrigued, but once you get past the risky decision to have multiple guitar solos in the same song, you can appreciate the Mayday experience and tolerate the bolted on storylines.
