Review

Gross narcissism

Nicolas Winding Refn’s twisted, self-indulgent film about the fashion world is visually striking, sadistic

Jesse (Elle Fanning) moves to Los Angeles just after her 16th birthday to begin her modeling career in Nicolas Winding Refn’s The Neon Demon.
Jesse (Elle Fanning) moves to Los Angeles just after her 16th birthday to begin her modeling career in Nicolas Winding Refn’s The Neon Demon.

Nicholas Winding Refn's new film (The Neon Demon) is, in fact, directed by Nicholas Winding Refn. This we come to understand, not only because of the film's disastrous screening at Cannes, where it earned substantial boos from an incensed audience, but because he not only puts his own name up before the film's title -- and the credits of his actors -- he also adds a smart NWR monogram at the bottom third of the screen to ensure there is no possible doubt who is behind it.

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Aspiring model Jesse (Elle Fanning) acquires a predatory motel manager in the form of Hank (Keanu Reeves) in The Neon Demon, the latest stylized thriller from Nicolas Winding Refn.

His oeuvre, which includes such brutally substantial films as Bronson and Valhalla Rising, suggests an auteur with a major violent streak, but his best work also invokes a kind of visual poetry, sublimating his carnage with a light dusting of grace and artistry. Since the relative success of Drive, an '80s inspired noir drama set in Los Angeles, however, it's as though he has been allowed to release his full id on the screen, indulging his twisty sadism and growing self-aggrandizement, and dropping the pretense of much else. Like Bowie's Ziggy Stardust, he has made love with his ego, and is losing his grip on his work.

The Neon Demon

75 Cast: Elle Fanning, Karl Glusman, Jena Malone, Bella Heathcote, Abbey Lee, Christina Hendricks, Keanu Reeves

Director: Nicolas Winding Refn

Rating: R, for disturbing violent content, bloody images, graphic nudity, a scene of aberrant sexuality, and language

Running time: 117 minutes

Like Drive, Demon also takes place in Los Angeles, not coincidentally. We meet young beauty Jesse (Elle Fanning) first lying draped over a couch in a high-couture blue dress, blood from her slit neck poured out over her body, dripped from her arms and onto the cold slab of floor in front of her. It turns out to be a modeling photo shoot -- albeit one that positively reeks of foreshadowing -- one Jesse accepted over the internet, which, she is warned by Ruby (Jena Malone), a seemingly friendly makeup woman, is "dangerous."

That's not all in her life she needs to be worried about. New to town, painfully young -- she's 16 but is told by her agency to tell everyone she's 19 -- an orphan and outwardly fragile, she's staying in a rathole of a hotel room, presided over by a menacing, predatory manager (Keanu Reeves), and threatened on all sides, like a gentle snowflake descending onto a scorching Sonoran cactus bed. Everything around her is a threat: She meets a pair of bitchy models (Abbey Lee and Bella Heathcote), who immediately see her as a potential usurper to their lofty position on the totem pole; a powerful fashion photographer (Desmond Harrington) upon meeting her clears the set and demands she strip down naked before him; even her hotel room is beset by a ranging mountain lion, which slips in through the back sliding door.

Jesse is the same type of innocent archetype as Betty, Naomi Watts' character in David Lynch's Mulholland Drive, fresh faced and ostensibly easy prey for the chaotic evil of the city to which she has moved. Like Betty, Jesse starts out too sweet for the cesspool around her, but she's also ravishingly beautiful, a fact not lost on her ("I can make money off pretty," she tells a young suitor). Soon, she's the buzz of the circuit, turning heads wherever she goes. At one point, one of the models she has just beaten out for an exclusive runway show asks her what's it's like to be the bright sun that everyone looks at with such rapture: "It's everything," she replies quietly.

At the show, given the all-important role of closer, she goes through a kind of transformation, induced by a vision she had earlier of an upturned triangle made up of three similar, smaller triangles. Take it for what it appears to be, a kind of house of mirrors of the soul, with her radiance reflecting back upon her. Shortly thereafter, she has lost her wide-eyed, virginal innocence, and quickly dumps the sweet boy (Karl Glusman) she'd been seeing. She embraces her rising star, and soon things become increasingly unhinged.

Suffice it to say, Refn drives the audience straight into the abyss of his artistic arrogance. We're treated to muddled scenes of violence and grotesquery (including Malone's unfortunate intimate encounter with a cadaver she's supposed to be making up for a funeral), culminating in an extraordinarily ill-conceived final visual affront -- one seemingly designed to force the besieged audience to head for the exits ahead of the final credits (I don't always agree with the Cannes cognoscenti, but I'd have to say they nailed this one pretty well).

Despite the film's blithe obtuseness, and Refn's arid self-satisfaction -- a film that suggests the fashion industry is horrific and cannibalistic is hardly breaking any new ground, after all -- he's too gifted a stylist to create something dull. Like fellow enfant terribles Gaspar Noe and Lars von Trier (with whom Refn supposedly has a long-standing feud), their worst work is still visually arresting, and sometimes even profound. A simple shot near the beginning of the film where Jesse walks down the abysmal outside hallway to her motel room is loaded with such threat you want to clamp your eyes shut, but in the end, all the mise en scene in the world isn't enough to overpower his distended view of his vision.

What's distressing is the sense that he's content to lie back and let these visual pyrotechnics and gross-out subversions fill the hollowed-out spot where his work could actually move an audience beyond just storming out. Naturally, it's not easy to create a work of art that actually digs into something of substance, revealing that which would otherwise remain in darkest shadows; it's quite another thing altogether to have a menacing male figure emerge from those shadows only to jam a jackknife down a young woman's throat as she sleeps.

MovieStyle on 06/24/2016

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