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Vox lux9/4/2023 ![]() ![]() It arises from the same impulsiveness as do her rage and aggression. Yet Celeste’s gift is a paradoxical one: it’s empathetic but impersonal, a connection that’s more a matter of impulse and desire, and that’s subject to a similar volatility, instability it remains, ultimately, all about her. Rather, what she displays is, in effect, leadership-standing up to shift and shape a situation, to change it. Her effort doesn’t dissuade him from shooting her it only suggests that, even in eighth grade, with no obvious talent that makes her a child of destiny, Celeste is different. There’s a thread of psychological insight running through the film, the notion of idiosyncrasy, distinctiveness: Celeste is introduced into the film when she alone, among the students in her middle-school class, doesn’t cower from the shooter but stands up and tries to engage him (in prayer, she tells him). The unrealized attempt to address these questions is, by far, the best thing about “Vox Lux,” even if it’s there only as a sketch. What is it that makes a person from a seemingly ordinary background able to create something, with their very presence, that will incite the devotion of millions of people? What’s it like for them to become famous, to face the daily demands of fame? In short, what’s it like to be a brand, to be beloved by millions as an image of oneself, and how does an artist’s public identity correspond with her private life-which may be forced into the spotlight with one false move? ![]() But the movie stands the concept on its head, depicting the eternal adolescence of Celeste as both a burden for her family and her entourage (even for herself) and also the wellspring of her success-of her ability to connect with an audience. “Vox Lux” illustrates that snarky aphorism that celebrities remain, throughout their lives, the emotional age at which they became famous. Her “rebirth” depends on Celeste’s coming-home concert to her native neighborhood in Staten Island, where the 1999 shooting took place-and it also involves a reconciliation of sorts with Ellie (still played by Stacy Martin) as well as with Albertine (who has, for the most part, been raised by Ellie). Celeste’s life is in disorder-she is an alcoholic and a drug abuser, and she has been the subject of scandal, after injuring a pedestrian while driving and making racist remarks about the victim. This “act” is also launched by a terrorist attack, one in which the attackers wear masks resembling the ones made famous in one of Celeste’s videos. ![]() In the second act, “Regenesis 2017,” Celeste-now played by Natalie Portman-has a teen-age daughter, Albertine (also played by Cassidy), as a result of that one-night stand. Somehow (in the era before social media) it goes viral, Celeste becomes a teen pop sensation, and, despite her religious background, begins to live it up, culminating in a night in a hotel with a rough-hewn hard rocker. She recovers, and in the movie’s second section, “Act I: Genesis 2000-2001,” she and her older sister, Ellie (played by Stacy Martin), write a song, which Celeste performs at a church service. The story is divided into three parts in the first, labelled “Prelude 1999,” Celeste Montgomery (Raffey Cassidy), thirteen going on fourteen, a middle-school student in New Brighton, Staten Island, is gravely wounded in a school shooting. Yet the subject of the film is the burden of a young singer’s celebrity, and the incidental subordination of matters of life and death to the story of a rising and falling star renders the film’s heightened tone absurd, unintentionally comedic-all the more so in that the issue that Corbet approaches with the greatest seriousness is fame itself. In a way, Corbet is dealing with great issues and making a major display of taking them very seriously. Corbet’s direction is sober, sombre, earnest, restrained the film is heavy with allusions to historic events, such as the killings at Columbine High School and the 9/11 attacks, which define the movie’s tone and set the plot in motion. With its extremes of experience and banal slightness of content, Brady Corbet’s rock-world melodrama “Vox Lux,” portentously labelled “A Twenty-First Century Portrait,” is an exemplary latter-day entry in the realm of cinematic camp. ![]()
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