It was in January 2017, around the same time that David Bowie’s death turned one year old. American director Brett Morgen had a heart attack and for three minutes, he says, his heart wasn’t beating, which put him straight into a fiveday coma.
“My life was out of control, I was a workaholic,” the filmmaker recalled while sitting on the beach during the last Cannes Film Festival in May. “I would die at 47 and all I would leave my kids as a lesson would be this crappy idea that they had to work hard.”
Then, still on a stretcher, he remembered Bowie, whom he had met ten years earlier for a film project that never materialized. “I knew he was this amazing artist, but I had no idea what a wise person he was and how much I needed his messages.”
So it comes as no surprise that the British musician takes on the mien of an existential coach speaking about life and death amidst a lysergic edition that compiles interviews and live appearances.
“Yesterday, when I saw the film with 2,000 other people, I had the feeling that every sentence in it was addressed to me, to my doubts and traumas,” says the American, taking the gray bangs from the front of his sunglasses and untying them Knot .of the purple tie. The night before, he had wrinkled his tuxedo while somersaulting down the red carpet minutes before the session for Bowie’s 1983 hit “Let’s Dance.”
To shoot the film, which opens in Brazil this week following a special screening in Cannes, France, Morgen had exclusive access to footage belonging to the artist’s estate. “Movie theaters have the best sound in the world, so I wanted to make a film that would replicate the arena experience and not just be a biographical thing. Everyone knows the Beatles were born in Liverpool. , You know?”
In fact, “Moonage Daydream” might not be the best introduction for the uninitiated to the pantheon of personalities built by David Bowie. Or even the historical line that has followed his career in music, from becoming a name in the stream of British rock in the 1960s until he emerged around the turn of the decade and folk, psychedelia, avantgarde, in addition to a fondness for Kubrickian science fiction.
Those familiar with the musician’s various masks will recognize, for example, his missing astronaut Major Tom from “Space Oddity”, the extraterrestrial scalphobetic Ziggy Stardust and also the elegant Thin White Duke, who subsisted on milk, pepper and industrial cans of cocaine. The Berlin phase of “Heroes” is characterized by tonal purification and minimalism, so that the British artist went to the dance floor in his most pop phase in the 1980s.
Although she does not rely on the socalled “talking heads” the successive testimonies of third parties biographical details delivered in brushstrokes can be guessed at. We learned about the London boy, bored of middleclass life in Brixton, who got his big break in the arts in his stepbrother, a former aviator hospitalized with schizophrenia.
But everything we know comes out of Bowie’s mouth. He’s the one who tells his story in interviews scattered throughout the cut of the film, spouting a few catchphrases, lying and selfdenial truthfulness doesn’t matter, it’s a documentary about performance, the director defends.
“The film isn’t about Bowie, it’s about performance because he was acting all the time if you believe what Bertolt Brecht says about performance,” says Morgen. The German director himself appears at a certain point in the film, stacked with other references such as Nietzsche, Issey Miyake, Fats Domino, Kaneto Shindo, Vermeer, William Burroughs, Adorno, Jack Kerouac, Fritz Lang, Lennie Dale, Man Ray, Ingmar Bergman … “It couldn’t have been otherwise. It was Bowie who introduced me to the culture.”
At this point it is clear that the director is somewhat deserving of raising the musician to the altar of the inevitable names of culture an antenna of the times themselves, as the artist unmodestly describes in one of the interviews shown in the film and the borders blur between pop and scholars.
The Bowie that emerges from the film is “the antiKurt,” says Morgen, comparing “Moonage Daydream” to his earlier music documentary “Montage of Heck” about another rocker, the frontman of Nirvana, composed of recordings he made himself. by the guitarist months before he shot himself in the head.
“Kurt Cobain sang about the pain of loneliness, and so did Bowie in a way, but in a more sensitive way. It was a film about death. This is about life, which is the realization that we are dying every second.”