Nicolas Winding Refn (2016)

There were boos and jeers from the audience that watched The Neon Demon at this year’s Cannes Festival.  Were those responsible angered by Nicolas Winding Refn’s film because they found it stupid or boring or outrageously disgusting?   Perhaps all three – the movie is each of these things – but getting worked up about the disgusting aspect was (is) a mistake:  it vindicates Refn’s belief that he’s made something seriously incendiary.  ‘Look at this reaction,’ he said (according to the Daily Telegraph) in response to the Cannes catcalls, ‘F— the establishment.  Youth culture, take it or leave it but you can’t deny it.’  Stephanie Zacharek in Time describes The Neon Demon as ‘purely an exercise in style, and what style!’; as the above quote makes clear, Nicolas Winding Refn is more pretentious than that.  In an interview with Christina Newland in this month’s Sight & Sound, he explains that he ‘wanted to make a film about purity and preying on purity’.  The S&S interview introduces The Neon Demon, in words the director might himself have supplied, as ‘a violent exploration of society’s obsession with beauty set in the cut-throat world of the Los Angeles fashion scene’.

In the opening sequence, the teenage protagonist Jesse lies bloodstained on a sofa.   The blood isn’t real:  Jesse is posing for photographs, taken by her boyfriend Dean (Karl Glusman), which she hopes will assist her quest for fame and fortune in Los Angeles.  Because Refn’s reputation precedes him and an 18-certificate the first scene, it seems a fair bet that the red stuff Jesse washes off at the end of this session will have turned to genuine gore before The Neon Demon is over.  And so it does, in abundance – except that, of course, it doesn’t really and you never feel the meant-to-be authentic blood is different from the imitation kind.  The beautiful cast is similarly artificial.  Elle Fanning is the radiantly naïve Jesse, who enjoys a meteoric rise to the top of the LA modelling tree.  Bella Heathcote and Abbey Lee are Sarah and Gigi, her jealous, eventually vengeful rivals.  Jena Malone is Ruby, a furtively obsessive beautician who touches up, in both senses of the phrase, not only the living but the dead:  she works part-time in a morgue.  Although the performers in these roles convey the one or two characteristics that the script (by Refn, Mary Laws and Polly Sternham) provides, they do so showing not the interpretative skills of actors but the deliberate camera awareness of fashion models.  (This isn’t to say they can’t act – only that they’re not expected to do so here.  To be fair to Elle Fanning, the one interesting piece of characterisation comes in her suggestion that Jesse is shrewd enough to realise she can exploit her look of innocence to career-advancing effect.)

In other words, the movie is itself an expression of the cosmetic world in which it takes place – and in which it’s sealed.  This occasionally gives what’s on screen a claustrophobic grip; more often, it confirms the vacuity of The Neon Demon.  The film is thought-provoking thanks only to its extreme inertia.  The dialogue is delivered ver …y slow …ly in … deed (and is, alas, entirely audible).  Refn gives the audience more than enough time to appreciate the colour co-ordination of each of his images and the placing of figures, alone or in relation to one another, in the frame (the cinematographer is Natasha Braier).  The few thoughts provoked in this viewer were, admittedly, negligible.   When Jack (Desmond Harrington), a controversial photographer, orders Jesse to strip and then daubs her in gold paint, I wondered if it took this long for Bond girl Shirley Eaton to be gilded all those years ago.  What Jack does in this bit is undeniably effective in reducing Jesse’s human importance:  I was less worried for her than I was that Jack’s freshly aureate hand might ruin his presumably expensive camera.

Jesse is attacked and pursued by the beautiful ugly sister-duo of Sarah and Gigi but it’s the rejected Ruby – whose sexual advances Jesse spurned – who eventually kills the heroine.  There are plenty of exotic animals in evidence in The Neon Demon – a live mountain lion, in Jesse’s dingy motel room, as well as several stuffed beasts.  The principal carnivores in the bitchy, dog-eat-dog world of the LA catwalk are, however, the models themselves.  Causing the death of Jesse might seem a win-win for Ruby who, as she’s already demonstrated in the mortuary, is a lesbian necrophiliac but, though we see a shot of her lying in what seems meant to be Jesse’s grave, Ruby is upstaged by Gigi and Sarah, who cannibalise the corpse of Jesse.  This struck me as improbable in view of how carefully any self-respecting model is supposed to count calories.

The abuses and excesses of the world being revealed here are such a well-established subject of satirical comedy – Zoolander, The Devil Wears Prada and Rage are various examples from the previous decade – that Nicolas Winding Refn’s exposé seems remarkably superfluous (and, though risible, it’s much less intentionally funny than any of those other three).  As Anthony Lane says in the New Yorker, ‘For those of us who have always believed modelling to be a well-rounded profession, jammed with carbohydrates and mutual support, The Neon Demon comes as a blow’.   I’d have thought the film was also too artfully lugubrious to appeal to horror-movie aficionados but I’d have thought wrong, at least to the extent that Mark Kermode is among plenty of critics to have given it a positive review.  The supporting cast includes Keanu Reeves, very bad indeed as the nasty motel manager, and Alessandro Nivola, perhaps hopefully uncredited as a fashion designer who once wanted to be an actor …

14 July 2016