Vox Lux

VOX LUX begins with a scene of absolute devastation. A gunman massacres many of his classmates in an American high school. A sequence as shocking as anything in Gus Van Sant’s ELEPHANT. After this bloody overture, the movie turns into a satirical, macabre version of A STAR IS BORN. Austrian audiences may be intrigued to discover this most American of films was inspired by Robert Musil’s “The Man Without Qualities”. “It’s about a character who is on the periphery of major events during the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire,” Corbet reflected of the links between the modernist Austrian novelist’s book and his movie after the film’s premiere. Bizarrely, the character in VOX LUX always there at the most seismic moments is Celeste, a pop star. Played by Cassidy/Portman, she is a survivor of the high school shooting who becomes the nation’s darling. Corbet is a true auteur with a very distinctive storytelling style. His first film took an oblique approach to fascism, showing how a boy develops the character tendencies that turn him into a Hitler-like friend. In VOX LUX Corbet portrays pop stardom with a cold, anthropological eye, showing precisely how Celeste becomes so cut off from the outside world that she can no longer maintain ordinary relationships with those closest to her. (Geoffrey Macnab)