Vox lux12/5/2023 The film was inspired by the revisionist histories of Robert Musil and W.G. It featured a young protagonist who was witness to the atrocities of an epoch, only to become a cause of them for the next. It examined key events that would go on, often inadvertently, to define the era. Sure, pop music retains an effectiveness when not asking too much of its listeners-but Vox Lux and its insipid attempts at creating a fictional pop world functions as a cautionary tale in the face of such a banal truism: Treating your audience as if they’re stupid tends to reflect poorly on everyone except the audience themselves.My previous film, The Childhood of a Leader, was set in Europe in the early part of the 20th century. “I’m a private girl/ In a public world,” Portman sings competently on “Private Girl” through thickets of vocal processing that are practically tactile in their over-application the sentiment lands with a dull thud of obviousness that suffocates the music as well as the film it’s attached to. She makes big-sounding music with Kurstin frequently at her side, but through writing songs for Celeste’s fictional oeuvre, their sweeping approach takes the form of an obnoxious blare. Her days as lead vocalist for British chillout group Zero 7 aside, Sia’s never really been much for subtlety listening to her strongest and most effective singles can provide the emotional uplift of hang-gliding to the top of a mountain with fireworks timed to explode the moment you reach the peak. If Walker’s contributions simply fade into the scenery, then Sia and Kurstin’s work represents the opposite. Walker’s scoring gets the job done in the truest sense, to the point where much of his music feels incidental when removed from the images it accompanies his “Opening Credits” theme stands out the most here, with piping, eerie vocals and unsettling ambience only matched by the horrifying, hollowed-out center of “Terrorist.” Otherwise, Walker’s orchestral compositions-which provide a solid, melodramatic foil to Corbet’s onscreen pretension-largely lose their effectiveness in a home-listening environment, a fans-only experience far removed from the obtuse high art of his solo material and collaborations with Sunn O))). Sadly, neither of the soundtrack’s halves provide much to sink one’s teeth into. Divorced from the screen, the Vox Lux soundtrack literally represents a split release between two of the pop machine’s most capable tinkerers and one of the most offbeat musicians of the last 40 years-a prospect as enticing as it is wholly representative of the film’s own thoughtless framework. For viewers looking to engage more fully with the music, there’s the soundtrack itself, which tacks on 10 instrumental score cues composed by legendary avant-garde figure Scott Walker (who also handled scoring on Corbet’s previous feature, the fascist-focused 2015 The Childhood of a Leader). Written and produced by Sia and ubiquitous pop guy Greg Kurstin (Adele, Halsey), most of the ten Cassidy-and-Portman-performed songs the duo composed for the film are jammed into subpar concert footage that closes out the film’s last 20 minutes. As target practice for the target-rich machinations of pop music itself, Vox Lux feels as forced as Portman’s Staten Island accent.Īmid these grasps for meaning, the clearest aspect of Vox Lux becomes its general disregard for the music itself. As a meditation about the daily horror of mass shootings in America and the accidental stardom that can accompany becoming the face of tragedy, it’s purely anachronistic the assertion that Celeste’s elegiac post-shooting song “Wrapped Up” could go viral in the early 2000s anticipates the normalcy of regular violence and instant fame in a way that betrays the pre-viral time period. As young Celeste (Raffey Cassidy) survives an unbelievable tragedy that’s become all-too-believable while her older self (Natalie Portman) is trapped in a cycle of self-loathing and trauma, Vox Lux attempts to tilt at a few thematic windmills-the American culture of violence, how said culture intersects with pop iconography, the pressure we place on public figures to behave in a way that reflects our own assumed system of belief-without fully committing to any one beat.
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