Blazing emotion pumps Vox Lux
LOVE Brady Corbet’s defiant second feature or loathe it, you have to admire the director’s blank refusal to venture anywhere near middle ground.
This making-of-a-pop-monster story is told in two parts. And when I say two parts, let me be perfectly clear: I mean it’s severed in the middle.
The common thread, and emotional compass, is provided by rising star Raffey Cassidy (The Killing of a Sacred Deer), who winds up playing her own daughter.
Cassidy shares the role of Celeste, a sweet, State Island teenager-turned-oxygen stealing pop diva, with Natalie Portman.
Celeste’s extraordinary transformation begins with a Columbine-style massacre at her local high school. She survives with a critical spine injury that will cause her chronic pain for the rest of her life.
When Celeste performs a song she wrote with her older sister (Stacy Martin) at a memorial service for her fellow victims, she becomes an overnight celebrity.
Under the guidance of an oily manager (Jude Law), the teen prodigy is catapulted into a glamorous world of Swedish hit-makers and Los Angeles video shoots.
Cassidy’s mesmerising performance combines innocence and vulnerability with an almost-disturbing precocity and perhaps a hint of opportunism.
This first section of the film ends with a misguided sexual encounter with an older, off-his-head British rocker, which we later learn has resulted in a teenage pregnancy.
Corbet (The Childhood of a Leader) then flashes forward maybe 16 or 17 years.
Celeste, now played by Portman as
battle-hardened and dangerously volatile prima donna, is implicated in another act of violence when gunmen disguise themselves in masks copied from one of her video clips before launching a terror attack in Croatia.
It’s a blazing performance from the Oscar-winning actress who filmed her part in just 10 days.
That raw energy shines through. And there’s a spectacular stage sequence choreographed by Portman’s husband Benjamin Millepied. Sia wrote the songs.
But this second part of the film feels strangely disconnected from the first, an effect only amplified by Celeste’s comeback concert, which goes on for far too long, even if the intended effect is to leave the audience feeling empty and hollow.
And having set up some potentially interesting themes, Corbet fails to develop them. Fabulously flawed.