42 | 2 stars | C-
Director: Nicolas Winding Refn
Cast: Elle Fanning, Jena Malone, Bella Heathcote, Abbey Lee
Synopsis: Jesse, an aspiring model, moves to Los Angeles where she becomes the target of her competitors.
Genre: Horror
Key awards: Cannes Film Festival – Main competition, Cannes Soundtrack Award
Runtime: 117 minutes
Language: English
Singapore rating: M18 (nudity and violence) with cuts
This review contains spoilers.
Nicolas Winding Refn has a penchant for provocation, and he channels this urge through various means: the stylised ultraviolence in Drive (2011) and the poetic, almost undecipherable allegory in Only God Forgives (2013). In both those cases it pays off, concocting a brilliant study of loneliness in the former and conjuring a phantasmagoria centred on redemption in the latter. Not so much with his latest piece as of 2018: The Neon Demon.
It is a horror presentation, not so much a film but a series of images conservatively curated and displayed, delivering both the neon hues promised in the title and their demonic subject matter – gore, cannibalism, and a scene of lesbian necrophilia that, fortunately perhaps, did not make it past the Singapore censors. It certainly wows the senses, setting up a fantastic universe of energetic masculinity central to Refn’s style. The soundtrack, without which the film would not possess its seductive and dangerous overtones, is indeed an orgasmic experience, bagging the Soundtrack Award at Cannes and arresting the viewer right from the start with Cliff Martinez’s piercing bass; Sia’s ‘Waving Goodbye’, released specially for this film, plays over the end credits. Yet beneath the shock and electric passion coursing through its surface are a vapidity of storyline, mannequin characters, and faux intellect which betray Refn’s lack of seriousness towards his subject matter.
Precisely what this subject matter is should be gathered easily enough from the first few scenes. Jesse, played by the blossoming Elle Fanning, is an aspiring model who moves to Los Angeles in search for fame at the advice of Dean, a photographer and her boyfriend-wannabe who shoots her first photographs. She signs on to a modeling agency where she is told to fake her age, from sixteen to nineteen, and gets into a test shoot by some renowned photographer (played by Desmond Harrington from Dexter) whose stern looks and slow movements verge on predatory. She attracts the notice and then ire of three women – Ruby (Jena Malone), Sarah (Abbey Lee), and Gigi (Bella Heathcote) – who end up murdering her. Before that, however, Jesse has to undergo the transformation from purity to profanity, from doe-eyed innocence to evil, narcissistic entitlement. She is noticed by a fashion designer who chooses her to close his show; there is a catwalk, and following it we see a shift in colour tone – from mysterious blue to malicious red – driven by a shift in moral position. Jesse recognises and exploits her physical charms, authentic and unmanufactured, and paradoxically is dehumanised following that recognition and exploitation.
The tale, thus, is one about the superficialities of the fashion world, the excessive reduction of the individual to the body and the body to the gaze (predominantly male), the obsession and commodification of the uncommodifiable. The neon demon rises from the angelic beauty of fashion, art, and cultural splendor, its perverted antithesis, ugly and explicit. Those who seek pure beauty are destined to fail. Either they die young, or they live many long years in vain. In our case the heroine is consumed by her hubris as she stands atop a diving board overlooking an empty swimming pool, flexing her vanity to a jealous and hateful Ruby. “You know what my mother used to call me? Dangerous. ‘You’re a dangerous girl.’ She was right. I am dangerous.” The very next scene sees her ambushed and cornered by the three women. The next shows her body sprawled in the pool, dying in spasms.
All this would have made a devastating critique of the modern art world, with its emphasis no longer on the search for meaning but a way to commodify and commoditise it. Unfortunately, The Neon Demon falls completely flat in this regard; that in itself would still have made for an enjoyable visual feast. Where the film truly fails in is its moral stance, a hypocritical championing of this very cutthroat and inhuman atmosphere that its storyline evinces and seems to decry. Refn is more interested in parading his well-crafted images, credit to director of photography Natasha Braier, than explaining (or even articulating) their logical connections. What is the relation between inauthentic beauty and sexual violence? What is Jesse’s backstory? Why does Ruby look like she’s part of the occult, and what is that ritual with her after the murder involving what looks suspiciously like genital secretions?
The dialogue is stiffness taken to the extreme. Characters almost always pause significantly before responding, and their responses seem to be taken out of gender studies textbooks. Sarah quips, “Who wants sour milk when you can get fresh meat?” Another comment on Jesse: “Nothing fake, nothing false. A diamond in a sea of glass.” One more, spoken with incredulous deliberation: “They say women are more likely to buy a lipstick if it’s named after food or sex. Just think about it. Black honey, plum passion, peachy keen.” This goes on for approximately the entire length of the film.
Having such exaggerated lifelessness definitely tells us what Refn thinks about the system, but it does so by screaming the words in your face. The camera lands on shot after shot of intense colourisation, and at times it almost works (such as the darkened, foreboding panorama of the city; the subdued and fragile light of the motel Jesse stays in). Then the characters appear and suddenly the horror takes on a new dimension: here we are, stuck to the screen, watching a feature-length perfume commercial. This is the hypocrisy of its film logic – in making the film, Refn appears to glorify the fetishisation by fetishising it further, submerging the story under a protective plastic of symbolism and connection. The director’s commentary in the DVD bares it all, unabashedly making links with all the props Refn could get hold of.
That being said, it is not the sheer number of symbols that bogs the film down. In themselves they are generally lucid and sometimes intriguing. In one scene, Ruby takes Jesse to a party; they enter a door, and we follow them sideways through a wall into darkness. A deadly musical score follows – danger awaits. Something sexual is about to be let loose, and it is, in bursts of blood-red light. We see the faces of the audiences illuminated for milliseconds, before they disappear, and again, and so on. It is a bondage show; a figure is suspended in mid-air, bent grotesquely, lights shimmering in bursts around its androgynous form. Jesse laughs nervously at Ruby. After all, that is her fate – to be consigned to spectacle, although not alive to witness it. Sarah, also present, glances at her. The shot cuts to Jesse. Sarah turns away. A predatory ecosystem is hence born.
It is, rather, an increasing hollowness that plagues many of the viewers. There is a scene of implied cannibalism, where Jesse’s eyeball turns up from Gigi’s guts (“I need to get her out of me.”). There is also a scene where Ruby masturbates over the corpse of a dead girl, substituting her for the divine and unreachable Jesse. (This substitution is made extremely clear with cuts between this shot and another of Jesse reposing in mild ecstasy.) We understand that yes, human parts are not exactly appetising and yes, screwing dead people saves all the hassle of dating and having to ask them out. But do we really need these bloated pictures with little context or follow-up, propped up by languishing tedium?
The Neon Demon has received a fair amount of backlash for this, when it was met with boos at its Cannes premiere. But the crowd’s other half embraced its unsettling psychology wholeheartedly, lavishing praise upon an essentially banal affair. Banal, yet filled with a wicked urge to titillate, dazzle, and mortify. Upon a second viewing of this piece little of my opinion has changed. Apart from catching a greater metaphorical count, it still bores and irritates. Refn has done well with his previous two films, and while I haven’t seen his pre-Cannes oeuvre I do look forward to it. The Neon Demon does not cement him as a director; his cinematography, not vision, may with hesitation and deliberation be hailed as “Refnesque”. At one point Jesse returns to her motel room and hears noises from within. She enlists the help of the motel manager and child rapist (played by an uncharacteristic Keanu Reeves). He opens the door, in anticipation of giving someone a good beating. Nothing happens. Then a mountain lion growls, materialising out of nowhere. The film is that lion.
Trailer (red band):
Film OST (ft. Cliff Martinez):
Sia - 'Waving Goodbye':