Vox Lux – first look review

The cliché of the vet­er­an pop star who has long lost their grip on rhyme, rea­son and real­i­ty might not be an envi­ron­ment you would want to spend too much time in, but this moral­ly fog­gy uni­verse has mer­it for fic­tion­al explo­ration. Per­haps for this rea­son alone there is jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for Brady Corbet’s claus­tro­pho­bic and all-round icky sec­ond fea­ture, Vox Lux. If not, then audi­ences might be seduced by the oppor­tu­ni­ty to see a pot­ty-mouthed Natal­ie Port­man cranked-up-to-11 and fir­ing on all sorts of crazy cylinders.

Pri­or to two acts, a pre­lude finds a class­room silenced by a dis­af­fect­ed male stu­dent who rid­dles a school teacher and her pupils with bul­lets. Set in 1999, it is an unsub­tle ref­er­ence to the Columbine High School mas­sacre, and sets out Corbet’s inten­tions as to his film’s over­ar­ch­ing verisimilitude.

In Act I, 14-year-old musi­cian Celeste (Raf­fey Cas­sidy) emerges as a wound­ed sur­vivor of the mass shoot­ing. Hav­ing penned an affect­ing lament on the tragedy, her song lures the inter­est of a record label. Under the guid­ance of her man­ag­er (Jude Law), and accom­pa­nied loy­al­ly by her sis­ter Ellie (Sta­cy Mar­tin), the indus­try sets to work in sculpt­ing this earnest young girl into a well-oiled product.

As of Act II, mat­ters have fast for­ward­ed to 2017. Celeste is unrecog­nis­able. Weary, keen of vice and pumped full of neu­roses, Portman’s old­er incar­na­tion is a tick­ing time­bomb, giv­ing any sane soul the impres­sion of an indi­vid­ual inch­ing towards the precipice. Her con­duct is as deplorable as it is unpre­dictable, seem­ing­ly inured and immured into the mould of a pop star fig­ure and in psy­cho­log­i­cal freefall.

With such an invid­i­ous cen­tral pro­tag­o­nist, Vox Lux is unlike­ly to strike a chord with every­one, but like­abil­i­ty is a tricky mea­sure of suc­cess. Does the film suc­ceed on the basis of its own inter­nal log­ic? On the whole, yes – even though there is argu­ment to be made that it is front-loaded with its most emo­tion­al­ly stir­ring scenes. The washed-out cin­e­matog­ra­phy by Lol Craw­ley sucks the air out of the pic­ture effec­tive­ly, suf­fo­cat­ing the view­er in a man­ner not dis­sim­i­lar to Lar­ry Clarke’s noto­ri­ous 1995 fea­ture, Kids.

Aside from the input of SIA, who is cred­it­ed as an exec­u­tive co-pro­duc­er and whose songs are brought to life by Port­man, Scott Walker’s com­po­si­tions bol­ster this feel-bad film with mel­liflu­ous orches­tral strains. In one strik­ing scene, the cam­era is fixed on the face of the young Celeste in a (pre­sum­ably) post-coital con­ver­sa­tion with a fel­low musi­cian, the pen­sive strings adding a sense of Hitch­cock­ian ten­sion to their conversation.

Vox Lux has impor­tant ques­tions to ask. Chief among them: if regres­sion and the risk of desta­bil­is­ing your men­tal health is the cost of fame, why would any­one set out to do its bid­ding? If Corbet’s slant says any­thing, it is a cyn­i­cal one. The dream might be the prod­uct sold, but a night­mare is often the pack­age delivered.