Moonage Daydream

 

Director Brett Morgen

MOONAGE DAYDREAM          B                                                                                                 USA  Germany  (135 mi)  2022  d: Brett Morgen

At the turn of the 20th century, Friedrich Nietzsche proclaimed that God is dead and that man had killed him.                                                                                                                             This created an arrogance with man that he himself was God.  But as God, all he could seem to produce was disaster.                                                                                                                   That led to a terrifying confusion: for if we could not take the place of God, how could we fill the space we had created within ourselves?                                                                        —David Bowie, 2002

A Proustian plunge into the subconsciousness of David Bowie, and whether you like him or not, this is impressive filmmaking, resembling the ecstatic surrealism of Guy Maddin, who lives in that subliminal world, where the use of vintage film clips is simply astonishing, interweaving bits and pieces from Georges Méliès’ A TRIP TO THE MOON (1902), F.W. Murnau’s NOSFERATU (1922), and Fritz Lang’s METROPOLIS (1927), all the way up to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and A Clockwork Orange (1971), and a whole bunch more (every movie featured in Moonage Daydream), resembling what Martin Scorsese did with archival clips in Hugo in 3D (2011), where obtaining the rights was an essential component of this film.  The oversaturated color is simply spectacular, shot on an IMAX camera, so if you’re a fan of David Bowie, this film is epic, the kind of thing you’d drop acid to watch back in the 60’s (Brett Morgen wants you to watch 'Moonage Daydream' on drugs), as it luxuriates in a hypnotic kaleidoscope of psychedelic colors, using never-before-seen archival footage, some of it rare and never broadcast before, officially authorized by the Bowie estate, where musical material is mixed with choice interviews of Bowie, including a stream of monologues, creating the effect of narrating personalized bits from his own diary.  Morgen is a tireless archivist who spent seven years with the material, experiencing a heart attack in between, which forced him to examine his own life more closely, channeling Bowie as a role model, where spontaneity became the key takeaway, reconfiguring a more personalized vision, weaving together an impressionistic collage of previously unseen performances, unheard recordings (most played in their entirety thankfully), some rare 16mm film stock, experimental video art, including abstract graphics and animations from Stefan Nadelman, never before seen paintings, drawings, home movie clips, photographs, journals, while a constant sound of Bowie’s music is mixed with his voice philosophically ruminating on subjects like spirituality, travel, aging, mortality, gender fluidity, and chaos.  The irrepressible artist openly expresses weaknesses and contradictions, while also acknowledging private and artistic crises, where the imperfections of the artist become part of his persona which go hand-in-hand with the idea of personal growth, where you have to learn to accept who you are, yet the film omits drug and alcohol problems, while only cautiously touching upon his aloofness.  Born David Robert Jones in London, coming from an ordinary childhood in the Brixton suburbs, Bowie suggests it’s a natural reaction to want to get out and explore the rest of the world, questioning who he is and what he wants to be, while continually evolving and discovering himself in the process, often appearing as strange and unworldly as he could be, not afraid of cross-dressing, insisting that it’s okay to be off-kilter and unabashedly weird.  Early in his career, Bowie views himself as a stranger to himself, as he was not that comfortable with himself, shy and struggling at times with confidence, afraid to show his vulnerability, claiming “I’m a collector and I seem to collect personalities.”  He rose to prominence in glam costumes that experimented with androgynous transgender dressing, appearing onstage with different alter-ego characters, though the lines are often blurred between them, including Major Tom, Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, Halloween Jack, the Thin White Duke, and the Blind Prophet, becoming a 70’s superstar in London, having an impact throughout Britain, where he can be seen performing with Jeff Beck doing an I’m a Man Yardbirds riff before amusingly breaking out into the Beatles’ Love Me Do at one point, Love me do - David Bowie - Moonage Daydream Clip - YouTube (2:56).  Some of this resembles Mick Jagger in Nicolas Roeg’s Performance (1970), where he wants to inhabit a different identity, mirroring the various onstage personas that Bowie assumes, while also feeling like an alien inhabiting the earth, a perpetual outsider, assuming that intergalactic role in Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), where he eventually comes to resemble David Byrne in those oversized pastel suits, drawing inspiration from the world of art, painting, drawing, dancing, and sculpting throughout his life, using creative outlets to help him stay in touch with his inner realm, while also traveling the world, developing an avid interest in photography, where he can simply immerse himself into a different culture as an anonymous observer.   

The highly subjective, experimental nature of this film is not for everyone, as it doesn’t follow a linear, biographic progression, doesn’t fill in the missing pieces of his life, and provides no talking points, no references to his many collaborators, where very little is actually identified, offering no timeline, instead it’s an immersive experience expressed through a stream-of-consciousness montage that takes us inside the artist’s ever-evolving interior realm in an attempt to get inside his head, where music unleashes the ferocity of his artistic identity.  While the Velvets and the Andy Warhol Factory got there first, David Bowie took glam rock and made it a lifestyle, extending the boundaries of nontraditional gender identity, where his impact cannot be ignored.  David Bowie has not been a touchstone in everybody’s lives, which may be a generational thing, so when he mentions he has an older brother who introduces him to Jack Kerouac, John Coltrane, Buddhism, and William S. Burroughs, some may immediately identify with that brother (whose sad end is tragically mentioned), coming from an earlier generation who were no longer kids by the time Bowie arrives, already young adults assuming responsibilities and careers, immersed in the working world, married and starting families, where the androgynous exploration of Ziggy Stardust is simply not on their radar, as the pubescent fascination doesn’t really resonate.  Bowie provocatively suggests, at one point, that one of the biggest mistakes of modern society is an overriding need to avoid chaos, instead of embracing and confronting it head-on, which may help understand his artistic sensibility, but it’s also hard to really believe that we should all be embracing more chaos in our lives, as maintaining some degree of emotional balance and overall stability is dependent upon not having to deal with more disruptive chaos, where the negative impact can be overwhelmingly destructive.  One senses that he’s speaking from a position of privilege to even suggest such a thing, as most of us are already dealing with such a staggering amount of chaotic political interference which actually precludes any possibility of happiness.  History is filled with hateful atrocities and targeted persecution, where the inflicted trauma feels like an onslaught of unending chaos, so it’s hard to really get behind that idea.  For those who are not avid Bowie fans, the everpresent stream of wall-to-wall music interspersed with continually interruptive interviews can get repetitive and feel exhaustive, like an over-extended music video, where it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by a frenetic onslaught of avant garde editing techniques that come fast and furious, where there’s really no relief, and while Bowie is portrayed as a self-reflective person, Morgen allows no contemplative moments for viewers.  There is an antidote, however, if you remove the sound and watch as a silent film (Sacrilege!), the stream-of conscious imagery is endlessly fascinating, changing the entire perspective, drawing attention to the filmmaker himself and his cinematic vision, where you can actually appreciate the work as a surreal dreamlike fantasia and not a music video.  For those who already love Bowie, this film is hugely successful, literally swimming in artistic flair, and for those who are not, this will not likely change your mind, despite a memorial tribute from Rolling Stone asserting Why David Bowie Was the Greatest Rock Star Ever.  There is one standout song, however, coming more than an hour into the film, which Bowie wrote with Brian Eno, Moonage Daydream [David Bowie - 'Heroes' (live)] - YouTube (4:56), a darkly beautiful love anthem drenched in melancholic irony that was featured in Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012), at first sounding like the Velvet Underground’s I'm Waiting For The Man - YouTube (4:39) with Lou Reed, a lifelong friend and collaborator, symbolizing Berlin in the 70’s when it was a divided city, living on the edge of despair, yet not succumbing to that despair, instead offering a unifying hope, almost like a prayer, where the slowly building intensity of the vocal to a fever pitch epitomizes the young lovers’ growing sense of desperation.    

Written, directed, edited, and produced by Morgen, the immersive nature of the film is significant, released during a worldwide health pandemic when no one was attending live concerts, so this opens up a communal experience for viewers that had been heavily restricted.  Many of those conducting interviews with Bowie are befuddled by the man behind the image, as they attempt to define or pigeonhole him, but he remains an elusive spirit whose honesty can be refreshing, as oftentimes, especially early in his career, he’s still searching to understand himself.  This is Morgen’s third pop music documentary, following the Rolling Stones film CROSSFIRE HURRICANE (2012) and his take on the tragic trajectory of Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain in MONTAGE OF HECK (2015), a film where the music never seems to stop, even during the interview segments, never really providing an overview of his life and career, as those can be found in Francis Whately’s television documentaries DAVID BOWIE: FIVE YEARS (2013) and DAVID BOWIE: THE LAST FIVE YEARS (2017), instead it accentuates certain phases of interest to the director, hoping to provide personalized insights.  Bowie hated the artificiality of Los Angeles, so in the mid 70’s he moved there for two years and kept a creative journal while living anonymously, soaking up the cultural differences, yet remained relatively reclusive, acknowledging that America filled spaces in his imagination that England couldn’t, where he felt like a “a foreign body,” explaining “If you feel safe in the area you’re working in, you’re not working in the right area.”  However, he quickly felt artistically burned out and in the grips of cocaine addiction, moving to West Berlin after searching for the most uninviting city, yet he left an indelible impression, forging new musical paths by working with Brian Eno, employing various experimental sound inventions that included ambient music and the William S. Burroughs cut-up technique.  There’s a theatrical quality to Bowie, who’s been in several films, including Tony Scott’s erotic vampire film THE HUNGER (1983) and Nagisa Ōshima’s prisoner of war drama MERRY CHRISTMAS MR. LAWRENCE (1983), while also performing theatrically in the lead role of John Merrick in Bernard Pomerance’s The Elephant Man in 1980, making him the first rock star to perform in a Broadway play, appearing onstage with Tina Turner in a surprise visit during her Private Dancer Tour, even making a Pepsi commercial together, evolving into an iconic stadium pop star while living a secluded life, all assembled into a collective mix of clips interspersed throughout the film, never spelling things out directly, allowing viewers to decipher what they’re hearing and seeing.  Bowie was an inveterate world traveler, living in a nomadic state, refusing to buy a house, always on the move like Dean Moriarty and Sal Paradise in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, preferring ships or buses, and especially loved trains, as he had a fear of flying, generally accompanied by a collection of books, yet the aching loneliness of this solitary experience allowed him to become an acute observer of life in obscure places.  A recurring motif is watching Bowie ride neon-soaked escalators in a Singapore mall while wandering endlessly through markets and temples and red light districts, like an explorer in a travelogue film, becoming a stranger in a strange land during the Southeast Asia leg of the Serious Moonlight tour in 1983, Bowie and the Fluorescent Escalators – Ricochet YouTube (3:48), yet we also watch him splatter paint onto a giant canvas on the floor in a Jackson Pollack style.  While there’s a latent obsession with the trailblazing aspect of his 70’s bombastic glam rock period, where the enigmatic title comes from a recording made during his Ziggy Stardust phase, with suggestions this may be his greatest pop culture achievement, there’s only just an inkling of interest in his later career, when he appears happier and more at ease with himself, with only a brief nod to his marriage to Somalian model Iman Mohamed Abdulmajid, while avoiding his death altogether from a prolonged illness with liver cancer, coming just days after releasing his final album.  Offering unique insights into the creative process behind so many of his music videos, songs, stage shows, and theater shows, where his career, and his identity, can be defined by constantly reinventing himself, this film is a celebratory tribute that nostalgically looks back exploring the life of a shapeshifting artist while also merging with the director’s own fascination with sound and picture and montage.   

Note

While not in the film, it’s important to point out the different versions of Bowie’s song I’m Deranged, written with Brian Eno, playing over the opening and closing credit sequences of David Lynch’s LOST HIGHWAY (1997), Lost Highway by David Lynch - Opening Credits YouTube (2:34).  And let’s not forget Seu Jorge singing Bowie songs in Portuguese in Wes Anderson’s THE LIFE AQUATIC WITH STEVE ZISSOU (2004), The Life Aquatic - Seu Jorge - YouTube (4:19), Greta Gerwig twirling, dancing, and leaping through the streets of New York to the music of Bowie’s Modern Love in Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha (2012), Frances Ha [2013] - Dance in the street - YouTube (1:08), also one must mention this unforgettable rendition of Bowie’s signature song before a jam-packed Wembley Stadium in London, David Bowie - Heroes (Live Aid, 1985) YouTube (6:50). 

Athena

 

Director Romain Gavras

Ouassini Embarek on the set

cinematographer Matias Boucard

ATHENA       B                                                                                                                            France  (99 mi)  2022  ‘Scope  d: Romain Gavras

The true hero, the true subject, the center of the Iliad is force.  Force employed by man, force that enslaves man, force before which man’s flesh shrinks away.  In this work, at all times, the human spirit is shown as modified by its relations with force, as swept away, blinded, by the very force it imagined it could handle, as deformed by the weight of the force it submits to.  For those dreamers who considered that force, thanks to progress, would soon be a thing of the past, the Iliad could appear as an historical document; for others, whose powers of recognition are more acute and who perceive force, today as yesterday, at the very center of human history, the Iliad is the purest and the loveliest of mirrors.                                                                  —Simone Weil opening paragraph from her essay The Iliad, or The Poem of Force, 1945, The Iliad, or The Poem of Force | The Anarchist Library

Gavras is the youngest son of renowned Greek-French film director Konstantin Costa-Gavras, whose political thriller Z (1969) was ripped from the headlines, shot like a documentary, and listed by Time magazine as one of "The 15 Best Political Films of All Time: The Votes Are In".  Like father like son, this is another blisteringly intense experience recalling the French suburban riots of October 2005 that originated in the mostly North African immigrant banlieue region of Clichy-sous-Bois, an eastern suburb of Paris, after the death of two young boys who had been escaping the police, eventually spreading to 274 cities and towns nationwide, triggering the worst rioting in France for 40 years, lasting over three entire weeks, forcing the government to declare a state of emergency, resulting in the burning of nearly 9,000 vehicles and the arrests of 2888 individuals, as dozens of public buildings and businesses were set on fire.  The French courts eventually cleared the police (French court clears police over Paris deaths that triggered ...), while the conditions that fueled the uprisings in the banlieues remain largely unchanged, ('Nothing's changed': 10 years after French riots, banlieues ...), as the same bleak hopelessness prevails, and the promise to provide racial and economic equity has abysmally failed, with poor education, rampant youth unemployment, and violent confrontations continuing from a heavy-handed police presence, often involving tear gas brigades, with French Prime Minister Manuel Valls saying in Le Monde that there was a “territorial, social, and ethnic apartheid” in France.  Unlike the widely heralded Kerner Commission following urban riots in the United States during the 60’s that revealed “Two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal” (The 1968 Kerner Commission Got It Right, But Nobody Listened), or the Scarman Report in Great Britain following the Brixton Riots of 1981, which identified “complex political, social, and economic factors” that created a “disposition towards violent protest,” but did not explicitly condemn police racism and denied that “institutional racism” even existed, with the recommendations ignored by the Thatcher government, there has been no official national debate on the crisis in France, as no commission of experts and legislators was convened to analyze the riots, resulting in a massive failure to address ongoing racial and religious discrimination.  Making matters worse, newspaper and television reports often depict these rioters as “violent” or “thugs,” though artists are often at the forefront of the protests, yet somehow they fail to address the circumstances that ignited these outbreaks.  What we’re left with, then, to fill the political void, is the arts community providing their own challenging vision, with Gavras using cinema as a theater of provocation, hoping to advance public arguments and discussions on the separate and unequal disparities in the the banlieues, where hopelessness and civil unrest continue to plague the nation.  Shot south of Paris in Évry-Courcouronnes, in the Parc aux Lièvres housing project (aka “the Rabbit Park”), where around 80% was shot with an IMAX camera, the last one available when shooting started (there are only around 50 in the world), this follows in the footsteps of the Mathieu Kassovitz film LA HAINE (1995), Jean-François Richet’s MA 6-T VA CRACK-ER (1997), Jacques Audiard’s Dheepan (2015), and more recently Ladj Ly’s Les Misérables (2019), all films shot in the suburban banlieue projects, where trust with authorities has never been lower, as residents are routinely stigmatized as criminals, where racial tensions with police are continually on high alert, using raw language and an ultra-realistic cinéma vérité shooting style to convey the immediacy of each moment, as these are tinderboxes continually on the verge of erupting into a firestorm of violence.

Gavras got his start making advertisements and directing music videos, and this is largely a choreographed movie, much like storyboards in movies of old, where sequences were carefully constructed ahead of time and rehearsed for months before shooting began.  Matias Boucard’s cinematography is the star of the show, easily the biggest single takeaway from the film, and not just the harmonious synchronicity of the tracking shots, which are utterly spectacular, but the sheer realism in capturing the impassioned outrage from the collective anger in the projects.  Reminiscent of Emmanuel Lubezki’s camera kinetics and complicated long takes in Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men (2006), the opening shot is a doozy, an electrifying 11-minute tracking shot that swivels on a dime from following a solemn police press conference, quickly turning into John Carpenter’s ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 (1976), as all hell breaks loose with a sudden mob insurgency when they ransack the police station stealing weapons, gear, and a police van before making an electrifying escape back into the protected walls of the Athena projects (named, appropriately enough, after the goddess of war), with armed residents standing guard atop the towering fortress awaiting the inevitable police response.  Written by Gavras, Ladj Ly, and Elias Belkeddar, it’s a Greek tragedy along the lines of The Iliad, an alliance of Greek cities that eventually prevail in sacking Troy, with a SWAT team of police in riot gear representing the massive force of the Greeks against the besieged banlieue fortress of the protected city of Troy, viewed as a nightmarish Armageddon vision of intensely staged combat where in the end all humanity feels lost, as there is no reconciliation, only blind hatred. This gritty thriller follows three brothers of French-Algerian descent whose lives are thrown into chaos following the brutal beating of their youngest 13-year old brother who was left for dead, with video footage pointing to the police, where the outraged community is a powder keg of unleashed fury ready to explode.  Abdel (Dali Benssalah) is a decorated French soldier who fought in Iraq and in the former African colony of Mali, now collaborating with the police, whose calm demeanor is in stark contrast to the incendiary emotions of Karim (Sami Slimane), the charismatic youth leader who aggressively starts a campaign of guerilla warfare against the police, while the oldest is Moktar (Ouassini Embarek), a drug dealer more concerned with hiding his stash of drugs and weapons from the impending police raids than assisting either of his brothers.  Karim despises the fact that Abdel refuses to take up arms and fight the police, angrily raging “You’re a military whore for France,” while Moktar constantly urges Abdel to protect his own skin above anything else.  These existential, post-imperialist choices reflect the dilemma of Arab and African French immigrants who are urged to assimilate, yet find opportunities glaringly limited by poverty, powerlessness, and racial divisions, where justice is something they never see, with absolutely no trust in the police or governmental authorities, where a lingering sentiment refuses to accept them as being French, instead associating them with criminal or terrorist behavior, where they are literally viewed as the scourge of the earth. 

The knock on this film is that it accentuates the stereotypes, with zero female presence, making little effort to establish any interior character development while also failing to provide social context, though much like the United States, police killings of civilians have dominated headlines in France for years, with the film addressing a prevalent lack of hope in the post-modern world, motivating Gavras to present a collapsing world that seems to revel in an unfolding civil war which sends shock waves across the nation, with television reports of mosques burning and right-wing attacks across the country.  Driven by the visceral allure of Pontecorvo’s revolutionary The Battle of Algiers (1965) and George Miller’s sensationalized Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), the aesthetic is an adrenaline rush on overdrive, using drones and swooping crane shots with no pauses or moments to breathe, as it’s simply a non-stop assault to the senses, an all-consuming experience in real time that continually immerses viewers into the center of the action, accentuated by the reverberating music of Benoit Heitz, aka GENER8ION, ATHENA - Netflix Soundtrack - GENER8ION YouTube (35:46), like a Greek chorus commenting on the action, with the camera jumping back and forth in expressing points of view, where the bloodthirsty allure of revolution becomes an apocalyptic day of reckoning of Biblical proportions.  As the various attacks unfold, it also includes a tormented family melodrama, with brother turning against brother, elevated to a mythical scale as they barricade themselves into the bowels of this concrete monstrosity, where much of it is shot in darkened corridors where it was hard to tell what was happening, resembling the chaos of a war zone, entangled in a perplexing labyrinth where there are no good options, each seemingly a dead end, while also mysteriously sheltered inside is a wanted sociopathic terrorist, Sébastien (Alexis Manenti), who has gone into hiding.  At some point in the ensuing chaos a young police officer named Jérôme (Anthony Bajon) is separated from his unit and captured, immediately turned into a hostage used for negotiations, demanding the names of the three policemen involved, with Karim refusing to believe the police report that the killers may not have been police officers, but far-right extremists posing as the police in a deliberate attempt to incite a race riot.  The same nation that gave us liberté, égalité, and fraternité is also the nation of Le Pen, the hijab ban, and horrific atrocities in Algeria, where the colonial fallout is still being felt.  While Gavras explores themes of racism, violence, and social injustice on a grand scale, he combines all facets of photography, editing, and the musical score with a potency that is perfectly synchronized, culminating in an adrenaline-charged tragedy of operatic dimensions, where a nihilistic fatalism devalues everything that exists, as freedom is a lost cause, recalling the finale sequence of Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1995), where this is simply a blitzkrieg of annihilation, leaving no room for empathy or reflection.  The reveal in the final postscript may be the most divisive aspect of the film, a flashback to what sparked the outrage, yet it’s handled with a deft precision, adding a sense of foreboding for the future, as cataclysmic divisions in France are only exacerbated by increasing political power of the far-right National Rally, whose nationalist, anti-immigration policies repeatedly connect immigration to Islamic terrorism, making any potential racial reconciliation impossible.  This deserves to be seen on the biggest screen possible, with the best sound systems, as much of the visual style was designed for the big screen, much like Hollywood action movies, but unfortunately it spent little time in theaters and was immediately streamed on Netflix, which is disheartening, as you can’t help wondering how that happened, as it seems like a huge mistake.  The film is dedicated to DJ Mehdi, a French hip hop and house music producer, and the memory of Bernard Moussa Gomis.