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Vox Lux
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A Disquieting Vibe
If you are in a viewing situation that allows this,
wind back to the first scene of Vox Lux immediately upon reaching its final frame (of the credits running in reverse
and in silence over an enigmatic series of textures). Everything in this
opening is strange, enigmatic, indirect, irresolute:
the sound of gunshots over the placid view of a suburban street (presumably
signalling the deaths of the household’s inhabitants, unseen); the odd
movements of a car and its occupant; the sudden transition from night to day.
Even the exposition of a key detail – the suicide of mass-murderer “Cullen
Active” (Logan Riley Bruner) – is given to us off-handedly, just as something
visible (if you catch it) in a mobile shot.
From this fragmented opening – which switches its POV
several times, reminiscent of Robert Bresson’s L’Argent (1983) and Gus Van Sant’s Elephant (2003) alike
(Van Sant’s brilliant sound designer Leslie Shatz is back on the case here) –
to the pop concert finale of Vox Lux,
there’s a huge distance travelled, yet also numerous threads of connection. And
both God and the Devil are mixed up, mysteriously, in these two extreme points
…
It’s not every week at the movies that you catch a
Natalie Portman vehicle which includes voice-over narration from Willem Dafoe
evoking Stockholm as “what business scholars and economic geographers call an
industry cluster”, or describing characters as being “somewhat on the losing
side of Reaganomics”. Not to mention the lordly encapsulation of its heroine,
Celeste, as “rolling off the cultural tongue like a principled anecdote”.
Brady Corbet’s Vox
Lux is a boldly stylised and intellectually ambitious film about pop music.
Or rather – to quote its own closing titles – it is a “21st century portrait”
in which the up-and-down biographies of pop stars, as part of the general
celebrity industry, intersect queasily with a cultural ambience marked by school
massacres, terrorist attacks and political leaders who trade on the easy
nihilism of “fake news”.
That’s a lot to cram into one story, but Corbet is up
for the challenge. First off, he breaks Celeste’s trajectory into two very
different halves. The “Prelude” set in 1999 and “Act I: Genesis” cover the
first steps to Celeste’s stardom. Incarnated in this half by Raffey Cassidy, Celeste
survives trauma (the tragic school shooting); the humble song written with her
sister Ellie (Stacy Martin) and performed at a friend’s funeral swiftly becomes
the nation’s “anthem”. The film then skips elliptically through the usual
phases of grooming to become a pop star: meetings with agents and managers,
recording sessions, the making of a slick video.
Suddenly, Corbet flings us far ahead, into 2017, for
Act II of the tale. Celeste (now played by Portman) is 31, and in desperate
need of (you guessed it) a little “Regenesis” in her somewhat tattered and
sordid career. (The scandalous incident that has undone her oddly echoes with
certain details of Australian-born art critic Robert Hughes [1938-2012] and his
1999 road accident in Broome, along with its aftermath – both Hughes and
Celeste mouthing off about malign media “conspiracies” against them.) This half
of the film is not synoptic like the first; instead, it telescopes everything –
disastrous press conferences, a tense exchange between Celeste and her teenage
daughter Albertine (Cassidy again), behind-the-scenes preparations – into the single
day of a big, comeback performance, culminating (as in the finale of Prince’s Purple Rain [1984]) with 15 straight minutes of a live
show.
Well, fairly straight – except for yet another ghostly
insertion of Dafoe reading what is possibly the most “omniscient” narration in
cinema history. This is Corbet’s way: the moment we risk getting too immersed
in the individual characters and their interpersonal dramas, the film yanks us
out with that voice-over. This level of Olympian (or Brechtian)
detachment will drive some viewers crazy, but it’s of a piece with everything Vox Lux aspires to do – and mostly
succeeds in doing.
Although the typical phases of a music biopic are used
by Corbet, he is also a dab hand at circumventing or twisting our expectations.
When Celeste “releases stress” before the big show by indulging in sex and
drugs (with her manager played by Jude Law), we count on her toppling over,
messing up or even dying before our eyes on stage – absolutely none of which
happens. (Corbet may have been remembering here John Cassavetes’ masterly Opening Night [1977]). On another level
of proceedings, Cassidy and Portman, so starkly different in every aspect of
their performances, hardly seem to be inhabiting the same character named
Celeste – and that is precisely Corbet’s point: identities are malleable,
history has no continuity, everything solid melts into the air.
While steeped in the history of many popular rise-and-fall-and-re-rise
movies about pop or rock music – from Bette Midler’s The Rose (1979) to the latest, woeful version of A Star is Born (2018) – Vox Lux belongs to a more renegade
tradition. Like Peter Watkins’ Privilege (1967), Todd Haynes’ Velvet Goldmine (1998)
and the little-known but sensational French production Les Idoles (1968), it takes the whole spectacle of the music
industry as a grotesque mirror of broader problems and trends in society – here
updated past the leftist ideas of previous generations to include a dizzy sense
of postmodern confusion and irresolution. Even at its most pointedly ironic,
the film seems to share in the frazzled uncertainties of its characters.
Moreover, Corbet belongs to a certain loose family of
filmmakers who shun the classical ideal of an invisible style and, instead, make
intensely evident the forms and shapes of their work – with, quite literally at
times, the lines of architecture, the movements of camera or actors, and the
beats of music cued up together in strict unison. Not to mention the explicitly
novelistic carve-up into acts, epilogue and prologue! This is not simply for
the sake of some show-off virtuosity; rather, the most powerful effects of such
films (when they work) derive from this insistence on us recognising their
form. The Big Daddy of this clan is unquestionably Stanley Kubrick, with
Austria’s Michael Haneke running a close second. But the progeny are quite
diverse and far-flung, including Peter Greenaway (The Pillow Book,
1996), Bertrand Bonello (Nocturama,
2016), Amat Escalante (The Untamed, 2016) and
Corbet.
If one thing unites them all, it’s an ambivalent
fascination with power and control: how people internalise, in their heads and
bodies, the regimentation of a social order – whether that order be an army
patrol, or an arena pop concert. Indeed, Corbet films the gauntlet crossed by
the adult Celeste on her way to the stage – through endless corridors – exactly
as Kubrick filmed the trenches of World War I in Paths of Glory (1957), using long, relentless, geometrical
movements. Not far below the veneer of civilisation, however, lurks a mass of
seething, Dionysian drives (like lust and aggression, or more plainly the will
to dissociate and “get out” of oneself) that threaten, at every unstable
moment, to topple us into an unruly, animal kingdom.
I did not enjoy Corbet’s directorial debut, The Childhood of a Leader (2016), one
little bit. I found it – as others may find Vox
Lux – arch, pretentious, emotionally distant, rigidly formal, and overstated
in the way it spelt out and hammered home its big ideas about history, politics
and family life. There were certainly things to admire in it – such as Scott
Walker’s thunderous orchestral score (Walker [1943-2019] is back for Vox Lux, blending his characteristically unsettling music with the
ingenious song repertoire composed for Celeste by Australian star Sia). But
there is a sureness of touch – as well as an air of poetic mystery – which
Corbet brings to his second film, and it bodes well for his future as an auteur.
Best of all, there is a beguiling ambivalence attached
to almost everything in Vox Lux. In
one sense, it’s easy to make a movie that mocks pop music and every lousy thing
it can stand for. When Celeste messianically declares herself to be the “new
faith” and even a “new New Testament”, we wince alongside those around her; but
by the time she’s reached her third triumphant “anthem” on stage, we can’t help
but bop along – just like Ellie and Albertine buried deep in the crowd – to the
“affirmative”, high-energy vibe.
A 21st century portrait? I’ll buy that.
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