The first time we see Elle Fanning in The Neon Demon, Nicolas Winding Refn’s cannibalistic catwalk, she’s reclining on a silk couch in a purple dress, her blonde hair up in an elaborate crown braid and her throat slashed. Colourful gemstones circle her eyes and deep red is streaking all the way from her neck down her arm.
It doesn’t take long for us to figure out this isn’t a crime scene but a fashion shoot. In the next scene, Fanning ritualistically wipes the stage blood away while a makeup artist (Jena Malone) undresses her with her eyes. Malone is the first of several women who will look at Fanning with desire, envy or sheer hatred. In this film, looks don’t just kill. They lacerate, massacre and exterminate.
‘Amateurish’ is the judgment of the modelling agency when they see the blood-streaked test photos sent by Fanning’s Jesse – a small town girl newly arrived in LA with dreams of stardom. It’s not quite the word I’d have chosen. Everything and everyone in this film is the epitome of slick professionalism, usually bathed in an unnatural florescent light that streaks the screen.
In spite of the splatter pics, the agency signs her and it takes about five minutes for the freshly-faced ingénue to become the industry’s new It Girl. Fanning was 16 when filming started and this fact makes The Neon Demon one of the least exploitative films about female beauty one can imagine, since Winding Refn needs to keep the camera at shoulder height. Don’t think of taking the kiddies, though. There’s plenty of nudity to come (‘Care for a little necrophilia?’) as well as shocking violence and lurid gross-out humor.
Winding Refn has already proved himself as a purveyor of style and shock with Bronson (2008) and Drive (2011), for which he won Cannes’ Best Director prize. Back in competition after five years, the Danish director wants The Neon Demon to do for models what Suspiria did for ballerinas. The film is almost unspeakably glamorous, luminously widescreen and bears NWR’s unmistakable, oh-so-cool stamp. It is also unbearably airless and gloomy. Someone should have really told the director that Hollywood satires are best fuelled by humour: far more, at least, than the following nuggets from the screenplay provide: ‘Beauty isn’t everything. It’s the only thing’, and, ‘Who wants sour milk when you can get fresh meat?’
Much more effective in evoking a slick nightmare are the savagely competitive supermodels, heartless designers and brutish photographers that pile up in Neon Demon‘s nocturnal Los Angeles. But the film ultimately becomes a bloodbath. One of the best things about Neon Demon is Cliff Martinez’s dazzlingly dark electronic soundtrack. Another one is Keanu Reeves’ cameo as an asshole motel owner (one of the film’s more sympathetic characters).
In the end, The Neon Demon provides plenty of eye candy, but not much food for thought. As a send-up of the vapid fashion industry, it’s got nothing on Zoolander.
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