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Rory Kiberd Michael Lanigan Lucy Ann McCabe ILLUS
TRATION Matthew Kelly Moonage Daydream Director: Brett Morgen Talent: David Bowie Release Date: September 23 It is in Us All Director: Antonia Campbell-Hughes Talent: Cosmo Jarvis, Rhys Mannion & Claes Bang Release Date: September 23 In 2017, filmmaker Brett Morgen received unprecedented access to the personal archives of David Bowie. It was enviable, this insight the director was granted. The late-singer-songwriter’s vault was a literal trove of cultural riches, being a staggeringly comprehensive library of his master recordings and media appearances. As such, what was less enviable was Morgen’s next task. He was to assemble a documentary on Bowie’s life from this archive, five million plus assets strong. The sheer depth of information contained within the collection could have led to a soberly comprehensive and chronological biography, or a bland dispelling of the artist’s mystique. But instead, Morgen resurfaced with Moonage Daydream, a hypnotic and psychedelic journey into Bowie as an artist, a public figure and an icon. Tapping into his allure by striving to match his restless ambition, the film is an ever-shifting kaleidoscope of visual aesthetics, oceanic soundscapes and philosophical tracts, narrated by Bowie himself. Told in a non-linear fashion, Morgen casts Bowie almost as a Billy Pilgrim-type figure, hopping back and forth in time. Cutting between eras as far apart as Ziggy Stardust and Black Star, the filmmaker eschews fact in favour of truth, implying this character is a fourth-dimensional being. Further still, by nodding to Bowie’s lifelong fascination with Nietzsche, Morgen plants in the viewer’s mind the thought that Bowie – the “Homo Superior” – assumed the mantle of God in the eyes of his followers. To many, he was the man who fell to Earth, the cultural architect of the 21st Century. A cinematic odyssey into a singular mind, it is a beautifully overwhelming examination of Bowie as a physical person, an ethereal presence and an astral being. Presented as was Earth been presented by experimental documentarian Godfrey Reggio in Koyanisqaatsi, Morgen treats him as an artist to get lost within, rather than one to be logically dissected via a ledger-book of facts. Moonage Daydream is 140 minutes of truth, Morgen’s truth. It is not who Bowie truly was, but as the filmmaker sees him. Borderline hagiographical, but aware of its bias, it is a captivating psychological trip, demonstrating why so many were entranced by his dynamic vision and deeply mournful of his loss. ML Cosmo Jarvis’ thrilling performance as Hamish, a Londoner visiting his mother’s hometown after the death of an aunt he never met, is all protracted tension, mumbling indifference and alienation. At least before an early car collision with two speeding teenaged boys shakes him out of who he might have been in a simpler film. Instead, we get to know Hamish in this stylised psychodrama from Irish director Antonia Campbell-Hughes through the groans and raw physicality of an injured man, one looking for answers with the conflictingly pervasive presence of the wreck’s one surviving teenager, Evan (Mannion). A strong directorial debut, the normality of this world is barely established before its protagonist is forced out of the role of detached outsider into a vulnerability that strikes as violent reawakening. The oblique plot revolves around Hamish’s attempts to communicate from within this state of quiet desperation, from intermittent video calls to his father at his Hong Kong production office (a coolly manipulative Claes Bang) to an emerging bond with Evan over the reckless death wish we are given to imagine they both share, the vital teen and his group of friends the embodiment of the life he might have lived had his own past played out differently. Campbell-Hughes herself makes a heightened cameo as the mother of the deceased and the emotional weight of the film is centred on similar incidents of connection which are more than slightly symbolic. For all its visual daring – the bleak cinematography of rural Donegal recalling more than once scenes from biblical painting – early plot clunkiness gives way to what is clearly the Irish director’s home ground: enigmatic, sensitive cinema. If the division between worlds is never fully resolved, the unfolding story convinces as one of connection where none should be: powerful, senseless connection, through shared pain and a shared experience of the land in the place of real belonging. Just like his audience, Hamish’s search for meaning is founded on guttural instinct more often than on logic, while the film’s human element rises above its impressive aerial slant and an appropriately eerie score by Tom Furse. LAMC A BOY MEETS BRO LOVE STORY