One Shot With Ed Sheeran review – well-planned spontaneity from all-smiling singer

Ed Sheeran floats through New York on a cloud of his own sunny high spirits in this hour-long Netflix special. He is the Candide of the music business, smiling benignly, strumming and singing, seamlessly pausing for selfies and fist-bumps and high-fives; he almost visibly absorbs energy from the saucer-eyed fan-worship shown by gobsmacked passersby and radiates it back at them. Maybe you have to be a Sheeran fan to really appreciate it, but this is another single-take bravura special from film-maker Philip Barantini (who directed Netflix’s searing single-take drama Adolescence) and his director of photography Nyk Allen. With no cuts (though there’s an allowable fast-forward bit, and the audio might have been tweaked in post-production) they follow the unselfconscious Ed as he completes a late-afternoon soundcheck at the New York theatre where he’s playing a concert later on, and then for the next hour, and with fans pretty much always swarming around him, he wanders through the city with his guitar for various encounters, some planned, some (supposedly) not. At one point Sheeran plays a song when a mate of his proposes marriage to his girlfriend, then he stages an impromptu gig on a tourist bus, then performs at a rooftop birthday party (there is a hilariously uncomfortable scene riding up in the lift in silence with a baffled non-fan businessman) and at a pub where he jams with some more friends. Then he grooves his way on to the subway to play on a train – and then, without a glitch, finds himself back outside the theatre. We follow behind as he glides through the foyer and triumphantly bops through the packed auditorium and up on to the stage to start the concert. As ever, Barantini pulls off some magical camera moves (the same that, during Adolescence, had cinephiles comparing him to Russian camera wizard Sergei Urusevsky). By being passed smoothly from handheld operators to drones and back again, the camera floats miraculously through enclosed interior spaces and out into the wide-open skies. The city streets and the theatre make this look a bit like Alejandro González Iñárritu’s single-take film Birdman (Or the Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), which also may have influenced Barantini a bit. The team of camera operators and crew remain invisible (though I think I glimpsed one on the subway); the production assistants who presumably have to get people to sign release forms are similarly discreet. There are, of course, some moments when the spontaneity looks suspect. At the beginning, Sheeran tries to hail a cab, misses it, and then hails another one which pulls over for him; this cab driver lets the camera into his vehicle without commenting on it. Hmm. Then there’s a purely outrageous scene when Ed happens to chance upon his friend Camila Cabello at the wheel of her car. “What are you doing in New York?” she gasps, a moment that isn’t going to get her any acting nominations. Ed explains and asks for a lift which Cabello gives him, and they have a bit of a James Corden-style carpool karaoke before she drops him off. What a bit of luck to find her! But Sheeran beams his way through it all, inexhaustibly. • One Shot: Ed Sheeran is on Netflix from 21 November.