VOX LUX

★★★★

By the time he was 26, American child-actor Brady Corbet had been in films by Gregg Araki, Michael Haneke, Lars von Trier, Olivier Assayas, Mia Hansen-Løve, and Ruben Östlund. When he moved behind the camera, for 2015’s The Childhood Of A Leader, the clichés of the actor-turned-director — deliverer of down-to-earth conversation-pieces that harken back to their theatre beginnings and allow thesps to shine — didn’t apply. Corbet’s debut was full of daring, ambition, and genuine iconoclasm. When you begin your directorial career with an overture setting rapid-montaged archival WWI footage to a bonkers Scott Walker score, and end it by turning your cineworld — and European history — literally upside-down by dint of a gymnastic camera move, you’re hardly making a humble arrival.

Corbet’s second flick, Vox Lux, shows those qualities have hardly abandoned him. It’s a satirical portrait of pop and the music-biz’s desire for narrative; and the way acts of gun violence are handled, mishandled — thoughts and prayers — and monetised amid the mania of late-period capitalism. Its cold open, a ‘Prelude’ (Corbet evidently loves chaptered intertitles), is a harrowing on-the-ground depiction of a school-shooting; its second act, titled ‘Regenesis’, opens with a terrorist attack shown from a cold, distant remove.

Throughout, we follow the life of a bubblegum-pop starlet — Celeste, in the iconic singular — and how it intersects with these moments of tragedy. First (as Raffey Cassidy) as teenaged victim of violence; then (as Natalie Portman), deep into mid-career, as iconic artistic entity/cash cow for a whole built-around-you empire, battling various demons, the predatory paparazzi, and a dangerous desire to live life as one ongoing performance. In the third act, well, we just sit down to a stadium pop-show, in all its surreal absurdity, high theatre, and naked humanity; Corbet recreating the feeling, at once transcendent and banal, of seeking to find escape or transcendence in choreographed dance routines, costume changes, and the communal mania of the arena.

Vox Lux’s pop songs were penned by Sia, meaning that they sound like legit hits. And, even better, Corbet has again roped in another score from Walker, the old avant-gardist unafraid of discordance, atonality, and genuine grandeur. Willem Dafoe narrates the film, and when he delivers a potted history of 20th-century Sweden — and its rise to pop power— over semi-ironic, archival illustrative-imagery, the spectre of von Trier lingers (the hyper-speed, home-video trip-to-Sweden montage that follows, however, suggests the infamous European-trip sequence in Roger Avary’s kinda-forgotten Rules Of Attraction).

Having clearly learnt from Haneke and von Trier, Corbet is both a happy provocateur and a ruthless excavator of squirrely ethical binds: delivering violent horrors with neither moral lesson nor giddy thrill; depicting pop with equal parts lacerating critique and earnest fandom. At first blush, the idea of marrying bubblegum music-biz machinations with scenes of brutal gun violence seems ill-conceived, or perhaps in bad taste. But the theatre of terror and the theatre of entertainment prove oddly ripe for contrast, comparison, and thematic union.

Here, terror incidents and cults of celebrity are uneasy equivalents: each acts of devotion and fervour, trading in iconography, captured on widely-disseminated video, hoping to arouse controversy and coverage. Coverage once meant mass-media, but Corbet sees the blurred lines of the new-millennial media circus, where the desire for content and outrage is insatiable, and things supposedly unlike the other — pop songs, music videos, stadium shows, footage of real people shooting real victims — become ultimately indivisible, everything funnelled into the one all-consuming ‘feed’. Vox Lux is an audacious, acerbic work unafraid of ruffling feathers; a film that cements its 30-year-old director as bona fide auteur.

THE GUILTY

★★★

If you’re into movies that are just one dude talking on the phone, here’s another entrant into the genre: the Danish flick The Guilty. Infinitely comparable to Steven Knight’s Locke, it’s a man-makes-calls drama freshly nominated for a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. Through it arrives on local screens with a prestige-picture sheen, Gustav Möller uses his new-fashioned. heard-through-digital-devices dramatic set-up to deliver an old-fashioned thriller.

Jakob Cedergren plays the call-centre equivalent of a hard-drinking detective: a cop who, due to a violent incident, has ended up on desk duty, working the night-shift, answering incoming emergency calls. Mostly, the incoming calls are about various drunks and lowlifes. But, when he ends up on the phone with a kidnapped mother, her abusive ex-husband, and their abandoned-at-home six-year-old, he’s drawn into a high-stakes attempt to avert tragedy; and a chance to atone for his recent on-the-job sins.

At its worst, The Guilty forwards the clichés of the virtuous cop, the man-on-a-mission who sees a truth that no one else can, and who knows that he’ll never solve the case if he plays by the book. At its best, however, the movie employs those tropes as grand misdirections, using the regular morality of these familiar dramatic devices, and the expectations that come with their employment, to delude an audience. For, as much as Cedergren’s cop thinks he’s the hero of this story, time and again he’s revealed to be terrible at his job: full of masculine ego and entitlement, a habitual line-stepper. Someone who thinks that the rules don’t apply to them can be framed as a renegade, sure, but maybe they’re just a walking workplace-code violation, breaking guidelines that exist for good reason.

THE SISTERS BROTHERS

★★★1/2

Patrick deWitt’s novel The Sisters Brothers is an absurdist comedy, employing arcane and lacerating language to examine the tropes, and the morality, of the Western. Brought to screen, in the English-language debut for French auteur Jacques Audiard, much of that sense of comedy, existing as it did in the words of the text, is lost. While that could make it something like a (familiar) disappointment for those following the page-to-screen journey, for those arriving fresh at this tale, The Sisters Brothers will instead play like a grim, un-romantic, blackly-comic riff on old, macho tropes; one where the grand vistas again play host to the horrors of a fledgling society that’s staked its incipient identity on the law of the gun.

John C Reilly and Joaquin Phoenix play the titular brothers, bounty-hunters travelling across old Oregon and California; the former sensitive and yearning for a change of career, the latter a mean, nasty drunk. Dramatically, it’s a study of both sibling rivalry and brotherly bonding, how hard lives are lived under both the influence and the spectre of dark, difficult, violent childhoods. Their boss, the mythical Commodore, is played by Rutger Hauer. He sets them on the trail of Jake Gyllenhaal’s duly-twitchy/squirrely/mannered/weirdly-voiced scout, who himself is tailing after Riz Ahmed’s outsider scientist, who claims to have created a formula that illuminates all traces of gold in a river.

The story continues apace, there’s gallows humour and deadpan delivery, and the unexpected depth of deWitt’s text — an absurdist style-exercise coursing with sorrowed emotions, grim themes, and moments of fanciful, if not psychedelic, flourish — persists in the adaptation. But, somehow, despite its impressive credentials, of source-text and cast and filmmaking and location, The Sisters Brothers never becomes more than its component parts; never feels as if it truly takes on a life of its own.

STAN & OLLIE

★★1/2

Stan & Ollie — a film, duly, about old-Hollywood comedy duo Laurel & Hardy — opens with a long one-shot, following lead actors Steve Coogan and John C Reilly as they walk-and-talk through studio backlots. They banter re: ex-wives, alimony, studio contracts, money; whilst the production bustles around them, preparing to set up a shot for the two stars. There’s a meta quality to this tracking shot: its onscreen depiction of all of the work, and all of the crew, that goes into staging a movie mirroring what’s happening behind the camera for this shot itself. There’s also a sense of ambition, something seen by just how long, and how far, Jon S Baird takes the shot, how big its single-take production-number grows with each passing turn.

Sadly, this opening sequence is the only time anything even remotely ambitious happens in Stan & Ollie. Thereafter, we settle into the realm of genial crowd-pleasery, in one of those revisionist-history biopics where you feel like you’re witnessing archetypes, not characters; listening to overdetermined dialogue out only to flag theme and forward said archetypes, not anything resembling human conversation. Coogan and Reilly do excellent work, both imitating the comedy icons and efforting to make their characters, and the relationship between them, feel lived-in. But there’s only so much they can do; especially given Reilly is buried beneath endless layers of latex make-up.

After that opening sting catches them at the peak of their powers, Stan & Ollie chronicles a late-career European tour, long after their star has faded. Depicting once-towering figures at the unglamorous end of their careers, it’s a portrait of men confronting their own irrelevance, and imminent oblivion: dealing with a world that’s past them by, careers coming to a close, and lives running out. These are ripe themes, but writer Jeff Pope only turns them into dramatic platitudes. He delivers a cowed, meek, weakly-sentimental film that seems made for nostalgic old people, shot through with a conservative notion that it, thus, shouldn’t contain anything remotely confronting, edgy, or uneasy.

JOHN MCENROE: IN THE REALM OF PERFECTION

★★★

Whilst they’re not quite at rockumentary levels of oversaturation, documentaries about sportspeople are plentiful. But, even if you’ve sat through endless 30 For 30 studies, you’ve never seen a sports doc like John McEnroe: In The Realm Of Perfection. Julien Faraut’s film — narrated by Mathieu Amalric — is part extended nouvelle-vague homage, part essay-movie, part existential study of sporting psychology, part absurdist cut-up-footage comedy; the film inspired by Jean-Luc Godard (whose quote, “Cinema lies, sport doesn’t,” is used to set the thematic tenor), Chris Marker, and, seemingly, abundant whimsy.

It was assembled from endless archival reels shot by Gil de Kemadec, France’s first national director of tennis, who shot players on the clay of the French Open, using the close-framed footage to use in instructional videos, teaching the form of tennis on a technical level. Under his lens, onscreen figures are both heroised and dehumanised, reduced to teachable components.

In The Realm Of Perfection picks that up in its own essay-movie-ness, before eventually settling on McEnroe-centric footage shot during the 1984 French final, one of only three matches McEnroe lost during that year. He becomes anti-hero of this cinematic study: a self-destructive genius lost in the existential torment of “the eternal injustice that afflicts him, and him alone”. Comic comparisons to Raging Bull (the “you fuck my wife?” dialogue laid over footage of a McEnroe meltdown) and Amadeus (a pop-cinema portrait of the prodigal genius) are made; and this ironic cinematic representation makes this documented reality somehow feel like the art (the tennis-prodigy meltdown in The Royal Tenenbaums) that was inspired by it. It’s a little sad, then, that the film ultimately turns more sports-doc conservative in its final act, essentially just replaying a match from the past as it happened.