Portman’s red carpet moment in Venice
Natalie Portman steps out on the red carpet for the premiere of her film Vox Lux at the 75th Venice Film Festival yesterday. The Oscar-winning actress plays a pop star trying to overcome a past tragedy in the film, which also stars Jude Law.
Stardom’s potency and price has been a hot topic at this year’s Venice Film Festival, not least with the unveiling late last week of Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga’s new adaptation of A Star Is Born. But Vox Lux vaporises the subject like a missile hitting a glitter ball. The second film from Brady Corbet, the 30-year-old director of The Childhood of a Leader, is a melodrama about a singer called Celeste whose fame is forged in a 1999 high school shooting, and whose life and career become a Spandexwrapped cipher for 21st-century dread.
Natalie Portman stars as the adult Celeste, and gives an outrageously enjoyable performance full of expressionistic head-cocks, wristflicks and flounces.
Admirers of her turn as Jacqueline Onassis in the biopic Jackie will be in heaven here: as in that film, there is an audacity and extravagance to her work that few actresses would dare attempt.
Yet the role itself is no joke, and Portman brings a laser-sharp interiority and focus whenever it
‘Her life and career become a Spandex-wrapped cipher for 21st-century dread’
counts. The young English actress Raffey Cassidy is outstanding, and very credibly Portman-esque, in a double role as the teenage Celeste and, later, the singer’s own teenage daughter – while Stacy Martin brings much-needed composure in the role of Celeste’s older sister Ellie.
Vox Lux begins with a 1999-set prologue in which the school shooting takes place. The young Celeste survives the massacre and a tribute ballad she composes from her hospital bed becomes a media sensation when she performs it at a memorial service.
The film documents the struggles of fame as she grows up and draws on the all-pervasiveness of millennial unease.
“I don’t want people to think too hard,” Celeste says at one point. “I just want them to feel good.” This rivetingly eccentric film blends both.
Vox Lux premiered at the Venice Film Festival; UK release date to be confirmed