Fanning the Flames: THE NEON DEMON

We’ve heard of Hollywood chewing people up and spitting them out, but Nicolas Winding Refn thinks he’s found a new spin on the old metaphor in The Neon Demon. Hardly the first story of showbiz’s capacity to lure new talent with false promise, Refn follows a pretty 16-year-old girl (Elle Fanning) freshly arrived in Los Angeles ready to make her way in the modeling business. A coldly calculating agent (Christina Hendricks laying down a fine layer of ice in her one scene) tells her to lie about her age (19, because “people believe what they’re told”) and books her a shoot with an intense famous photographer (Desmond Harrington). That’s just the start of a skeevy journey up the ladder as she draws jealous attention from all the older models (like Bella Heathcote and Abbey Lee), lamenting their advanced age (mostly mid-20s, but some are pushing, horror of horrors, thirty) and staring at her with daggers in their eyes. If looks could kill, they’d tear her apart limb by limb and steal back the work that’s always flowing to the younger, the newer, and the more exploitable.

Per usual, Refn’s shallow approach is one of moody synths and long, brooding silences punctuated by staccato bursts of dialogue traded like hot barbs in flat tones. Sometimes this works for him, like the dreamy artsy cars-and-gore Drive, transcending its trappings to become a slick, woozy, romantic and muscular homage to Michael Mann and Walter Hill. Other times this fails him, like the gross and gaudy Only God Forgives, a pointless exercise in masculine posturing and blacklight set design. Neon Demon is the midpoint between those earlier efforts, bringing a swirling generalized menace to the long passages of driving electronic music and pulsing strobe lights, fussily composed frames – Natasha Braier’s coldly sensuous cinematography splayed out with high gloss, like fashion spreads – capturing the entrapment of beautiful women in uncomfortable positions. It effectively communicates the danger inherent for a young person lost in the lower rungs of the entertainment business, trading her looks for a chance at stability.

Refn isn’t a particularly original or deep thinker on the topics at hand. Any insight the film has stops with simple statements like a model coolly reporting “Anything worth having hurts a little” or a casually dismissive designer’s snap, “Beauty isn’t everything; it’s the only thing.” So what we’re left with is a simplistic and repetitive exploration of tired old themes. Refn, with co-writers Mary Laws and Polly Stenham, keep the plot agonizingly flat. When not befriended by a nice guy (Karl Glusman) or a seemingly helpful makeup artist (Jena Malone), Fanning poses and reacts in sequences that find her surrounded by predators, sized up as meat and flesh, objectified, commodified, and exploited. There are the agents, photographers, competitors, men. Even a big cat somehow appears in her cheap motel room one night in a sequence of surreal dread that almost seems like it must’ve been a dream until someone casually mentions it several scenes later. But none of these moments or characters have any life to them. They remain slickly photographed, but empty and uncharacterized. Who are these people? What do they want? Where do they come from? What are their inner lives? It’s hard to say.

The movie’s derivative images (from Lynch, Argento, Kubrick, and a host of directors from the avant-garde and music video worlds) turn on conventional themes of greed, envy, and the lengths people will go to become famous and stay young and beautiful. But it acts like that’s enough. It’s totally fascinated with itself, an L.A. commentary made up entirely of clichés, and a style made up entirely of posturing, grooving on its own pulsating aura of unease and meticulous design. It’s also a dispatch from nowhere, hermetically sealed with no relation, real or metaphorical, to reality. Refn envisions its showbiz world as empty and depopulated. There are hardly any extras, and the only way we know Fanning is moving up in the fashion world is that a character tells us. The whole industry seems to be made up of our cast, and doesn’t extend past the bounds of any given frame. The only spark of life is Keanu Reeves, doing great, intriguing work in a couple scenes as a sleazy motel owner. He’s given a Movie Star entrance, and digs into his character-actor role as if he’s walking out of another, better version of this movie.

The Neon Demon visualizes its tired observations from a stylish remove, passing itself off as profound when it’s just played out. The endeavor is merely an exercise in animating its sparse ideas through a slow molasses drip of art house trances goosed with a dried-out straight-faced camp quality and a few effective horror movie excesses. A scene of a murder heard through the walls – or is it another nightmare half-realized? – has surreal chill. And the movie builds to making a spectacle of itself in its final scenes for a long-delayed payoff with ostentatiously preposterous, half-motivated, and grotesquely self-amused violence and gross-out appeal. A corpse post-autopsy is given a sort of spit shine, a nice girl’s fate is as the red mist in a softcore shower of blood on two others, and a climactic eyeball gag is at once horrible and hilariously audacious. By that point the movie has spilled over into the heights of its ridiculousness, surprising and gratuitous, one of those movies that wants to finger-wag society’s desire for flesh and blood while also relishing the opportunity to stage some and lick it all up. I couldn’t help but laugh. It’s like a small, nasty, pseudo-smart splatter picture stretched out to the point of self-serious tedium.

On The Road: THE ROVER

The post-apocalyptic Western plays upon the inversion of its setting. Where a traditional Western is always on some level responding to progress, the inevitable movement from a Wild West to our present day, the post-apocalypse goes backwards. There’s the same iconography: rugged untamed landscapes, solitary masculine figures, and periodic outbursts of gunfire. But instead of representing a flowering that leads for good or ill to modernity, it is sickly, decayed, frayed, beaten up and downbeat. The post-apocalyptic setting is hardly fresh, but this particular iteration can draw upon its genre roots to compelling effects.

It’s certainly the most, and almost only, interesting aspect of Australian writer-director David Michôd’s new film, The Rover. It takes place against just such a crumbled West backdrop, even if it’s not the American west in this case. Opening text tells us that we’re in “Australia. Ten Years After The Collapse.” We never learn what is meant by this “collapse,” a refreshing change of pace. But we certainly feel its effects. The outback has risen up, nature swallowing the sparse towns with plant growth and choking supply routes along crumbling shantytowns that clearly used to be quaint villages, roadside stores, and suburban sprawl. Here there is desperation without even a glimmer of hope.

Guy Pearce stars as a man who really wants his car back. It’s stolen in the open sequence that watches as a thief (Scott McNairy) and his accomplices (Tawanda Manyimo and David Field) crash their truck and continue their escape with in the stolen car. Pearce, a stoic, grizzled man wearing faded, unflattering shorts and a determined grimace, sets out to reclaim his property, giving chase across an unforgiving wilderness sparsely populated with criminals and those simply doing what they have to in order to eke out another day. Along the way, he finds the car thief’s brother (Robert Pattinson), shot in the gut and left for dead. Turns out, the young man isn’t too happy about that turn of events and is happy to help Pearce track his brother down.

It’s a simple plot, spare and episodic. The two men are moving inevitably towards the car and to a showdown of some kind. That conclusion seems likely to be bloody, what with the carnage that seems to follow wherever Pearce and Pattinson’s dusty road trip takes them. Creepy characters along the road include a grandmotherly madame (Gillian Jones) with a shack full of teenage boys, a gun runner (Jamie Fallon), a doctor (Susan Prior), and some military men (Nash Edgerton, Anthony Hayes) whose presence hints at something of a governmental force that exists so far away and so theoretically that only their big guns give them any power whatsoever. The people are malnourished, dehydrated, and suspicious. Even the encounters that manage to end nonviolently are fraught with tension and danger.

The fabric of society is as frayed and on edge as these men are. Pearce and Pattinson hold the screen with a grim smolder. Their performances are gruff, fly-bitten. (Was there a fly-wrangler on set?) Pearce moves deliberately, keeps his eyes deathly quiet, and isn’t answering any questions. Why is his car so important? His determination tells us it’s all he has. Pattinson speaks more, but with a gargled mumble that’s hard to parse. He’s earnest, naïve, and maybe has some mental problems of one kind or another. They’re an awkward match, held together only by their final destinations.

The film takes its two central performances, clenched and uncommunicative guys who fumble around for words when they speak at all, and radiates their inner pain outwards. Their grief and guilt pulse in the very landscape around them, vast and foreboding in Natasha Braier’s razor-sharp cinematography, Peter Sciberra’s austere editing, and the sparse, precise sound design. It’s all so very intriguing, but never gets beyond that initial level. It remains an interestingly visualized and imagined world, convincing and complete. But what happens inside it just doesn’t add up to much. In the final shots we finally learn why Pearce is so driven to reclaim his car, and it’s at once a mild punch in the gut and cause to say, “that’s it?” Throughout it is excellently evocative, but uninvolving. The more that happens, the more that’s revealed, the less I cared. Its setting is expertly drawn, but what happens in it disappoints. Individual details are impressive, but add up to nothing.