“That’s what I love about pop music. I don’t want people to think too hard. I just want them to feel good,” says pop star Celeste, the tragic figure around whom the director-scriptwriter Brady Corbet has made a film.
Corbet, who acted in films by Michael Haneke, Lars von Trier, and Mia Hansen-Løve, has thought long and hard about pop stars in the 21st century. This has not resulted in brilliant insights, but Vox Lux is a welcome counterbalance to fairy tales like A Star is Born. Stars are not born but made and their life is dangerously absurd.
Natalie Portman plays Celeste, a pop diva who thanks her fame to a consoling song that she wrote as a young girl when she was recovering from a gunshot wound during a deadly shooting at her school. Many years later, she returns to the scene of the crime for a comeback concert, consumed by cynicism, narcissism, and uncertainty, and partly the victim of an industry that mechanically turns emotions into dollars and fans who see and hear what they want.
She has no monopoly on the truth but it is probably wrong to expect her to. Sia and Scott Walker provided the soundtrack, but it is not absolutely overwhelming. Vox Lux has highs and lows, but the changeability matches the disillusionment.
Read more about: Brussel, Film, Natalie Portman, Jude Law, Brady Corbet
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