Vox Lux: why Natalie Portman turned into a pop star for dark tale of celebrity and mass shootings
- Portman plays a girl who is injured in a shooting and records a tribute to the victims that makes her a star
- The cast and director talk about Sia, celebrity, violence and the media
Anybody who saw Brady Corbet’s directing debut The Childhood of a Leader will know he’s an actor-turned-filmmaker with a singular voice. While that was an operatic study of 20th century totalitarianism, his follow-up Vox Lux is a contemporary tale set at the crossroads of tragedy and fame.
A thematic continuation, “this movie dips into a different kind of brashness and vulgarity,” he says, “simply because we’re living in fairly brash and vulgar times.”
Beginning in 1999, young pupil Celeste ( The Killing of a Sacred Deer ’s Raffey Cassidy) is injured in a high-school shooting. After recovering, and with the help of her older sister Eleanor (Stacy Martin), she records a track dedicated to the victims, a tune that unexpectedly turns her into a star.
Naturally, given the sequence takes place in the same year as the infamous massacre at Colorado’s Columbine High School, Corbet knew he’d face objections. “I’m a parent and I knew I was never going to handle it in a gross way; I was going to handle it in an ethical way,” he says, typically self-assured.
“So it was on my mind. But every time somebody acted a little offended by it, I just wasn’t having it. I just didn’t buy it. I felt like it was a fake empathy and it drives me a little nuts. The characters are fictional, the shooting is fictional … because we didn’t want to explore a specific tragedy.”