Vox Lux

Unless you are a pop-concert aficionado, you may need some time to settle down after seeing Vox Lux. (Fans will be revved up by the quite spectacular finale and may not want to settle down at all.) In fact, the final credits are in silence, so that is settling.

This is quite a strange film, a different kind of star is born. It opens with some home videos showing the talent of Celeste as a little girl, with a voiceover narrator, Willem Dafoe. That seems rather nice, even cute. Then the title comes on screen, Prologue 1999. At first night and darkness, cars on the road, a solitary walker – then a transition to music class after the new year’s break, a genial teacher, eager students – and then a shocking experience in the school (memories of the killings at Columbine that year). It has a deep effect on Celeste who was in the class, knew the boy, is wounded, spinal injuries.

Celeste is close to her sister, Eleanor, and in hospital they spend time creating a song, lyrics and music, to commemorate those who have died. They perform in a candlelight memorial. So far, so American, normal and abnormal.

The abnormality will tend to pervade the rest of Celeste’s story.

There are two chapters and a finale. The first chapter is called Genesis and is set in 2000-2001, New York City and the experience of 9/11. The second chapter is set in 2017, called Regenesis. The focus is on Celeste and her career which takes off more spectacularly than anticipated. Celeste is fourteen.

We are introduced to her sometimes snarling manager (Jude Law) and her rather smarmy agent (Jennifer Ehle). Appearances are managed. Celeste is able to manage dance lessons despite her spine. More music, trips to Sweden, meeting a local pop star (with consequences) – there is a certain fascination in how a star is born and how a star is created and a star is moulded.

The director of this film is actor Brady Corbet (Mysterious Skin, 2004) whose other directed-film was the often eerie Childhood of a Leader (2015), again the portrait of a young disturbed child and his growing into a fascist leader. In Vox Lux, we finish with Celeste at 31, something of a wreck of a woman, emotional and beyond, feuding with her sister, dependent on her manager and her agent, imposing her erratic moodiness, sometimes collapsing, sometimes stage triumphant, on her daughter.

While the portrait of Celeste is intriguing, it is the casting which contributes considerably to the intrigue. The teenage Celeste is played with initial innocence, increasing shrewdness, ambition-fulfilment by British actress, Raffey Cassidy. But, not only does she play the young Celeste, she also plays Celeste’s daughter, Albertine. She is most persuasive in both roles.

Natalie Portman is the older Celeste, a bold, sometimes brazen, performance, pitiable at one moment, repellent the next. It is a tour-de-force performance, very different from other Natalie Portman performances. And, in the glamour and glitz of the Finale, she is the supreme embodiment of the singer, dancer, performer (beyond-Madonna, for example).

At times, Corbet directs sequences of his films like installation pieces. At other times, he is realistic. In the Finale, he goes for broke in the lavish concert style.

It’s not exactly a recognised word, but at the end of the film it occurred to this reviewer, ‘bizarrity’.

Peter Malone MSC is an Associate of the Australian Catholic Office for Film and Broadcasting.

‘Vox Lux’ is subtitled ‘A Twenty-First Century Portrait’, a wildly ambitious title for a film but one that accurately if unsubtly captures the scope that director Brady Corbet’s sophomore feature aspires to. It’s billed and marketed as a Natalie Portman star vehicle, and star in it she does, but only when she arrives onscreen at the halfway mark. The plot distils a strange mash of gun violence and American cultural imperialism, and its feels like it wants to make a lofty statement about the state of global affairs, but the result is just as grim and ugly as one might expect from these ingredients.

In a pre-credits sequence, a teenager enters his school with an automatic weapon, wreaking devastation on his classmates and teachers. In one classroom, 13-year-old Celeste (Raffey Cassidy) tries to talk him out of his rampage but receives a bullet in her neck in response. In the aftermath, Celeste is rushed to hospital, returning to school after undergoing physical therapy to perform a song with her older sister Ellie (Stacy Martin) at a memorial for the shooting victims. Their original composition goes viral and Celeste is soon signed by a passionate manager (Jude Law) who has big plans for the young talent.

During Celeste’s swift and curated rise into fame, ‘Vox Lux’ tries to make a point about the manufactured nature of celebrity or the hollowness of popular music, but whatever it is trying to say, it does it without any clarity. We watch her learn choreography for her live performances, shoot her first music video, head off on a European tour, go home with a member of a band that she opens for. These little vignettes don’t add to whatever ‘Portrait’ Corbet is trying to paint, they’re just there. If it’s attempting to expose how our stars are crafted, it does so with little insight, and whatever links it’s trying to establish back to the shooting are quickly forgotten.

Midway through the film, the script (written by Brady Corbet from a story by Corbet and his wife Mona Fastvold) leaps forward to 2007, with Celeste now a global superstar drawn along the lines of Lady Gaga or Katy Perry. Celeste (now played by Natalie Portman) has her own teenage daughter, Albertine (also played by Raffey Cassidy), who is probably closer with Aunt Ellie than her own often absent mother. In addition to mothering duties, there’s a tension that suggests Ellie is also doing a lot of uncredited ghost-writing on Celeste’s albums.

This section of the film (titled ‘Regenesis’ – the film is divided into four parts, which feels like a ploy to boost its indie festival credibility) kicks off with another shooting, this time perpetrated at a beach resort by a group of terrorists wearing iconography from one of Celeste’s music videos. Celeste juggles press conferences (where journos draw uncomfortable links between the violence and her music), her borderline reliance on various substances and her frayed relationships with Albertine and Ellie, all while relaunching her career with her new album about rebirth, titled “Vox Lux”.

When Portman arrives, strutting diva-like through each scene and firing off her lines like angry shotgun blasts, she is strangely magnetic despite her character’s shortcomings. It’s not a good performance per se – the surface feels a little too dominant and there’s never a sense of anyone beneath the veneer – but she’s so much livelier than everyone else that you’re just pleased to have someone interesting to watch. There’s an emotional distance from Celeste too – the time jump creates a strange dissonance from Portman, augmented by the ongoing presence of Raffey Cassidy, now playing Celeste’s teenage daughter, Albertine (and continuing to struggle with her American accent). Apart from Law, who gives the film’s best turn and adds a genuinely lived in, rumpled feel to her gravelly manager, the rest of the ensemble doesn’t manage to register. That said, Willem Dafoe’s recognisably raspy tones make a surprising appearance as the Narrator, but his interjections sound more like the wannabe philosophical insights found a pretentious university paper than an insightful window into the prickly protagonist.

Everything culminates at Celeste’s concert, an ugly, flashy, hollow finale that never convincingly sets out whether it’s trying to send up today’s pop music scene or it’s trying to be a bona fide stadium spectacular. Whichever it is, it fails, and so too do the songs, contributed to the soundtrack by the Australian pop superstar Sia, who has churned out some of this decade’s best hits as both a songwriter and a performer. They’re flat and unmemorable, and Portman’s miming and choreography are lacklustre. That this is supposed to be the climax of ‘Vox Lux’ speaks volumes.

Callum Ryan is an associate of the Australian Catholic Office for Film & Broadcasting.