![]() Fourteen-year-old Celeste Montgomery (played as a kid by the quietly coltish Raffey Cassidy) survives, albeit with a bullet permanently lodged in the back of her neck.Ĭeleste and her churchy older sister Eleanor (Stacy Martin) pen an uplifting ballad of perseverance to sing at the candlelight vigil - a song that with a few tweaks from a savvy producer soon becomes a smash hit single, cannily cashing in on our national tendency to turn individual grief into collective kitsch. Unsubtly subtitled "A Twenty-First Century Portrait," Corbet’s film is very much concerned with historical and cultural signifiers, beginning on “the eve of the new millennium” in 1999 with a harrowing school shooting on Staten Island. Or, as I texted a friend shortly after the screening, “This movie is kind of an a-hole and I think I love it.” ![]() How you feel about such a line will probably determine what you make of the movie, succinctly summing up as it does this picture’s bracingly ostentatious style and dyspeptic diagnosis of contemporary American malaise. Watching Celeste spiral out in the end, you think not of her remarkable backstory but instead of a well-known arc, about what fame can do to the young and naive.About halfway through writer-director Brady Corbet’s electrifyingly obnoxious “Vox Lux,” the sardonic, unseen narrator voiced by a wry Willem Dafoe describes our pop superstar protagonist as "prisoner of a gaudy and unlivable present that had reached an extreme of its cycle." The links between violence and pop music and between pop music and healing are similarly ambiguous. Since Celeste comes across like a typical product of early fame, it never becomes clear exactly how she has been shaped by the strange tragedies of her life. Vox Lux would have been an entertaining film centered around child-star allegory alone, but the three acts of extreme violence that Corbet includes are jarring, out of place. True to the film's themes, the songs are uplifting but don't reveal much about Celeste's inner life (“I'm a private girl in a public world”). There are exhilarating moments throughout the finale, in which Portman dresses like a shiny Oompa Loompa and performs Sia's synthy bangers. She is cruel to the sister who's the hidden talent behind her music, and her candidness is a PR disaster waiting to happen. Despite a strange Staten Island accent, Portman excels at playing the volatile celebrity, the adult version of a too-young star who turns out sour and jaded after decades in the public eye. ![]() She fields tough press questions about the attacks, gets real with her daughter (also played by Raffey Cassidy, aka young Celeste) while trying to sneak-order wine, and generally tries to keep cool while her team buzzes around her. This second act unfolds over the course of a single day, before Celeste takes the stage. If at first her grief was appropriated for her art, this time her art has been appropriated to cause more grief. The kicker: The terrorists wore glittering masks, originally made famous in a Celeste music video. In the lead-up to her big comeback concert, the entire production is nearly thwarted by news of an attack in Croatia. He had worn dark, shimmery eye makeup-now Celeste's trademark look. When the film jumps to 2017, with Celeste played by Natalie Portman, there's an eerie corollary between her persona and the shooter. ![]() If Vox Lux acknowledges pop's potential to heal and move the masses, it seems to prove the opposite for Celeste: She gained a certain kind of power, but eventually at the sacrifice of her own humanity. ![]() “I don't want people to have to think too hard, I just want them to feel good,” she goes on to say, buying into the genre's supposed brainlessness. In Vox Lux, there's also some initial embarrassment over pop music young Celeste shows this while talking to a rock star she meets and later hooks up with. Another recent rise-to-stardom film, the Lady Gaga-starring A Star Is Born, was laced with an anti-pop slant (depending on how you read it). At first she is portrayed as smart but green and excitable, someone whose empathy-driven ascent is polished by AutoTune and choreography. ![]()
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