Vox Lux

Synopsis: Celeste (Raffey Cassidy) is a 13-year-old music student who survives a school shooting in Staten Island, N.Y., in 1999 and who goes on to be a pop star. Eighteen years later, she is about to launch a career-topping tour but must face the fact that fame has come at a heavy price.

Writer/director Brady Corbet tags his film “A portrait of the 21st century”, something which, given that we’re only a short way into it is a rather hubristic claim. Nevertheless it’s good to see a film with ambition, even better when, as it is here, that ambition is substantially realized.

Vox Lux opens in the last days of the 1990s with a brutal school shooting which takes us in memory back to the Colombine High massacre of 1999 and the beginning of an era when random large-scale violence became part of American and Western society (when Celeste goes to New York shortly thereafter the World Trade towers are, pointedly, still standing).

As a survivor of the shooting Celeste writes a song with her older sister, Eleanor (Stacy Martin) that becomes a chart sensation (as we are told in Willem Dafoe’s narration) and launches her on a career as a pop diva (Jude Law in sleazy form has a small role as her hard-nosed business manager). The film then jumps forward to Celeste aged 31 (Natalie Portman takes over the role). She has a daughter, Albertine (played by Cassidy), conceived with a grunge singer, a history of drug abuse including a widely publicised car accident, her relationship with her sister has frayed and  that with her daughter is no better. She is in other words, the classic pop star casualty - loved by millions but estranged from the world around her and herself (literally so as she is variously hidden by masks or heavy glitter make-up, the former which come back to haunt her).

Insofar as the pop diva, birthed by Madonna in the 1980s and emulated by innumerable variants since from Britney Spears to Lady Gaga, is an iconic representation of the malaise of consumer capitalism, and that is a defensible argument, Vox Lux works as a portrait of the emptiness of our hyperbolized times.  It is a relatively narrow thesis but for the most part it works precisely because Corbet doesn’t overplay his hand, allowing Celeste’s story to embody his message, which is,to paraphrase Shakespeare in 'Macbeth', that pop culture, and thereby modern Western society, is a tale “told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing”.

If Cassidy is effective as the young Celeste/Albertine, Portman gives a powerful performance as the older woman hardened by her so-called success (although for some reason she affects a New York accent which the younger Celeste did not have, nor, for that matter, does Albertine). The film ends with a concert sequence that is rather disappointing both in terms of staging and the songs by Sia, a contemporary pop diva with a deconstructive approach to her work. Unfortunately she seems to have decided to make her contribution some kind of homogenized pabulum (not that I could understand the words), which makes eminent sense but from an entertainment point of view (particularly as the film's release date puts it in competition with the thematically-related hits A Star Is Born and Bohemian Rhapsody which both employ this well-worn device, it is commercially-questionable. Whether it is artistic integrity, failure of vision or a missed opportunity I could not say.

Vox Lux is far from being a perfect film but for the young (also 31 years of age) actor turned writer/director on only his second film it is an impressively ambitious one.

 

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