Vox Lux

 Brady Corbett's Vox Lux (2018) seems a companion-piece to the director's enigmatic The Childhood of a Leader (2015).  The Childhood of a Leader is all prelude to significance that occurs almost completely off-screen, after the film's final frame.  By contrast, Vox Lux is all postlude -- it concerns events occurring after a mass murder at a school that colors everything that happens in the movie, a grim shadow that darkens the career of the film's protagonist, a pop star who seems similar to Lady Gaga (or possibly the Icelandic Bjork.)  The Childhood of a Leader had a consistent, bleak tone and was all of a piece; it's discordant elements were literally discords -- that is, the wildly ornate score by Scott Walker working against the muted Bresson-style mise-en-scene.  Vox Lux is completely unstable with respect to its subject matter and tone -- the movie seems hellbent on compressing together as many wildly discordant elements as possible:  Vox Lux contains primitive home movies, a plummy orotund narration that sounds like excerpts from a novel by Thackeray (recited in a florid way by Willem Dafoe), a horror film mass shooting followed by a sort of Star is Born rock-and-roll biopic, tense dialogue sequences between mother and daughter that have the flavor of an Ingmar Bergman film, and, finally, an exuberant concert sequence that ends the movie that could have been shot and choreographed by Jonathan Demme (it looks like Stop Making Sense) --  in fact, a closing title informs us that the film is dedicated the late Demme.  What this all means is hard to define and the film luxuriates in ambiguous and confusing mysteries.  The movie that is most similar to Vox Lux is Paolo Sorrentino's equally bizarre This Must be the Place, a picture that stars Sean Penn as a Jewish punk rocker (imitating Robert 
Smith of "The Cure") engaged in seeking revenge for the Holocaust.  As with Vox Lux, your reaction is some variant of "What the fuck?"

The film's heroine, Celeste, is first seen in home-movies prancing around for her father's camera -- this would be pretty ordinary except for a very fat woman in the background who seems to be accompanying the little girl on some kind of keyboard sitting across her lap.  After some flamboyant narration, Dafoe telling us about how Celeste was named and that name's implications -- weird Masterpiece theater prose that completely disrupts the film and rips us out of it (Corbett seems anxious to keep us from identifying with what we see on screen) -- the picture shifts into horror movie mode.  A car hurtles along a dark highway.  A boy walks in the impenetrable gloom.  We see pools of light under street lamps.  Where is this? Who is in the car?  Whose shadow stalks across the screen?  Where is he going?  A title tells us that what we are seeing is "Prelude".  In a brightly lit, if dour middle-school band room, the teacher is welcoming the students back after the holiday break.  A goth kid with black contact lens and wearing inky dark and sepulchral garments enters the class room.  He guns down the teacher.  Celeste, who is eerily unafraid, tries to talk to him.  She offers to pray with him.  He opens fire after saying he's "already killed so many" and shoots Celeste through the neck.  A SWAT team breaches the school and comes to the band room where about twenty kids are heaped up against the wall in a gory pile of corpses.  We never find out what happened to the gunman, a kid whose name is Corbin Active.  We see Celeste horribly injured in am ambulance.  A procession of ambulances drives along a dark, frozen river.  In the hospital, Celeste slowly recovers.  Her sister, Ellie, who fortuitously skipped school on the day of the massacre, visits her.  Gradually, the two girls work out a song obliquely referencing the shooting.  Ellie is about 17 and Celeste seems to be 14.  In a wheelchair, Celeste with Ellie attends a religious service in which an Episcopalian priest urges that the congregation pray for everyone including the perpetrator.  Asked to speak, Celeste sings her song. The next sequence is called "Genesis" and identified as 2000 and 2001.  Ellie and Celeste's song has been recorded and become a huge international hit.  The girls have acquired an agent, a tough-talking hoodlum played by Jude Law -- Law's performance is intentionally jarring:  he struts around and talks like Sylvester Stallone in bizarre and profane gangster lingo -- Celeste tells him not to swear so much around the pious Ellie.  Celeste and Ellie go to Stockholm where they record an album in a Swedish studio.  The girls are now misbehaving.  Ellie takes Celeste to bars where she drinks until she vomits.  Terrorists attack Manhattan, bringing down the Twin Towers.  With their agent, the girl's fly to LA where they make a video featuring Celeste on the back of a motorcycle driven by a man in a grotesque sequin mask.  (The song is called "Hologram.")  Celeste goes to a club where she listens to a heavy metal group and, then, has sex with the singer -- he says he loves pop music; she says that he reminds her of Corbin Active, the kid who tried to kill her.  Returning to her room, Celeste finds Jude Law in bed with Ellie.  The next day a plane crashes into the World Trade Center.  The third sequence in the film is called "Regenesis".  It's now 2017.  Celeste is a huge pop star but is also addicted to booze and has had trouble -- she was involved in an accident in which she killed a pedestrian while drunk (cashing his family out with 13 million dollars); at the accident, Celeste unleashed a torrent of racist vituperation; this is all off-screen and reported to us by the narrator.  Celeste has also blinded herself in one eye by an overdose of "methanol" a few years earlier -- like Odin, she has surrendered an eye for wisdom. There follows some initially confusing scenes involving the 35 year old Celeste (Natalie Portman), got up in Goth make-up and punk hairdo, and her daughter, played by the same actress who performed the part of the teenage Ellie.  At first, it's hard to figure out the relationship but we learn, after some mystifying scenes, that Celeste ended up pregnant after her encounter with the LA musician and "as a child, had a child."  Celeste has essentially abandoned the girl, who is now about 14, to her sister, Ellie with whom she is estranged.  Celeste is planning a come-back tour, beginning in New Brighton, the town where the school massacre occurred. (I think the place is supposed to be on Staten Island.)  But things are complicated by a mass shooting on a beach in Croatia -- some thugs, their faces concealed by the sequin-glitter masks used in the video for the song "Hologram" have shot up a tourist beach and killed twenty people.  It's not clear who did this or why.  And, furthermore, it's uncertain whether the massacre was some kind of perverted homage to Celeste or mere a coincidence -- the terrorists needed masks and the "Hologram" masks were the most readily available.  Celeste has a long painful colloquy with her daughter whose name is Albertine.  Albertine confesses that she has just lost her virginity.  This horrifies Celeste and she viciously accuses Ellie of parenting malpractice.  Celeste attends a press-conference and makes a bizarre and tasteless comment:  "I've got more number one hits than a AR-47 with a thirty mag roll."  She refuses to cancel her New Brighton concert and an interviewer brings up the accident in which she killed the pedestrian.  Celeste, after a very bad day, goes back to the hotel where has sex with her agent, Jude Law's character.  She is high on painkillers (she still has a bullet in her neck) and gets very drunk, inebriated to the point where she has to be carried out to the tour bus.  The last section of the film is a concert sequence entitled "Finale".  This conclusion to the movie shows Celeste performing several songs that seem to allude to the shooting at the school -- the songs are fully choreographed with pulsing laser light and a chorus of dancers supporting Celeste who postures and struts on the stage.  The dancers wear mask like those involved in the Croatian beach massacre.  Ellie, who we learn has written most of Celeste's songs, is in the audience with Albertine and Jude Law.  The narrator tells us a Dorian-Grey-style secret; after this revelation, we see Jude Law bathed in diabolical red light and Ellie with Albertine bobbing up and down in the enthusiastic crowd.  When the last song ends, the movie is done.

There's a spoiler below; you have been warned.

As with Childhood of a Leader, Corbett's direction is eccentric.  There are many scenes of people walking along corridors or vehicles on empty highways.  The shots of the skyscrapers of Manhattan picture the buildings as dark, ominous towers and the montage is scored to belligerent symphonic music by Scott Walker -- these images seem a precursor to Corbett's new movie about an architect, The Brutalist released at film festivals in New York and Toronto to great acclaim.  There are many startling images -- for instance, when the girls go to Manhattan, we see the island at night with sinister music and, then, flashes of the face of the punk rock kid with whom Celeste has a child; the boy's pale face splashes on the screen in double-exposures with the gloomy Manhattan skyline.  There are weird non sequitur scenes -- for instance, Celeste gets into a nasty exchange with a fan in the restaurant where she eats with Albertine; it's cringeworthy and the scene just goes on and on.  Exposition necessary to understand scenes is frequently delayed until we have been intentionally confused -- this is the case in which Albertine, who is identical to the young Ellie, suddenly appears.  Celeste seems too young to be her mother and the sequence is very disorienting.  The concert seems are glitzy and menacing at the same time.  In one scene, Celeste as a teenager is learning a dance choreographed to her music -- the room is dim and lightless and she glides behind a professional dancer who shows her the moves with a robotic dispassion and, even, uncanny indifference; it's disquieting although I don't know exactly why.

What is this movie about?  It seems that Celeste has, at first, inadvertently (and sincerely) capitalized on her survival of the school shooting to become a celebrity.  Later, she seems to be directly profiting from her notoriety.  She asserts, I think authentically, that she is acting in good faith (at least when she is a teenager):  she remarks that "(she) doesn't want to make people think too hard; I just want them to feel good", justifying in this way, the pop music that she has written in the aftermath of the massacre (she's talking to the heavy metal punk who gets her pregnant).  It's an open question, posed a bit indirectly by the film, as to whether the terrorists in Croatia were acting to achieve popular fame.  The same question can be posed about the 9-11 terrorists.  And this relates to Celeste's celebrity -- didn't she become famous entirely because of a horrible crime (which she has exploited?.  Is fame the spur to mass murder or ideology?  Or was Celeste always pre-disposed to becomes a great singer and entertainer -- this is suggested in the narration accompanying the shots of her as a child.  (After all, Madonna or Lady Gaga became famous without being involved in some sort of horrible massacre.)  The movie's big reveal is a cheat, but one that is pretty scary:  the narrator says that after Celeste was shot by Corbin Active, she was cast into a limbo between life and death-- the devil, Celeste believes, came to her in that state and she made a deal with him:  she would serve the devil with her music, if he spared her life.  (This revelation is accompanied by images of Jude Law glowing in fiery red light).  Of course, this supernatural revelation is over-determined and, probably, merely symbolic:  Celeste has made a Faustian deal with the fact of the massacre and its perpetrator -- she will become famous on the basis of the murder and suffering of others.  But this seems unfair -- there is abundant evidence that she is courageous (she's not afraid of Corbin) and highly talented and, probably, doesn't need the devil to pave her way to success.  As with The Childhood of a Leader, the question posed by the film is the genesis of the man (or in the case of Vox Lux, the woman) of destiny -- it probably doesn't require a shooting or childhood misfortune to make a person a famous figure; fame of this kind is, most likely, bred in the bone. But if this is truly the case what is movie for?