Elle Fanning (Broad Green)
Nicolas Winding Refn’s stylish new thriller nearly sent a woman sitting next to me into early labor at a press screening this week. The prospect of new life screaming from the birth canal would have been an appropriate reaction to a film that was roundly booed at Cannes. Slick and visceral, gorgeous and vapid, entertaining and ridiculous, the movie leaves some viewers staggering out of the theater wondering what they have just seen. The Neon Demon is not for everybody, but if you can get past little things like cannibalism and necrophilia, it’s a hilarious Grand Guignol satire of the fashion industry.
Sixteen-year old Jesse (Elle Fanning) moves to Los Angeles with hopes of becoming a model. With a darkly violent portfolio courtesy of brooding photographer Dean (Karl Glusman), she impresses modeling agency executive Jan (Mad Men‘s Christina Hendricks). Makeup artist Ruby (Jena Malone) and creepy photographer Jack (Desmond Harrington) are just a few of the industry figures that want to eat her up. And naturally, this newcomer is resented by a cadre of veteran models who are suddenly upstaged by this jailbait who is instructed to tell everyone she’s really 19.
The plot is a familiar take on the doe-eyed innocent trying to keep her virtue amid a pack of Hollywood wolves, but Refn doesn’t put you through the usual motions. Taking cues from ’70s giallo and ’80s exploitation movies, he creates a film that’s visually stunning and experimental. Entire scenes seem like high-concept light shows, and these resemble the gorgeous screentests that director Henri-Georges Clouzot made of actress Romy Schneider in his never-completed film L’Enfer. That’s just one of many influences; Refn gleefully cribs from sources as disparate as Alfred Hitchcock and Russ Meyer.
As the plot machinations grow more preposterously bloody, it’s clear the director is having fun, as are some of his actors. Fanning is well cast as the pretty ingenue, and Refn somehow gets a decent performance out of Glusman, who was absolutely awful in Gaspar Noé’s 3D self-indulgence Love. He pulls off a sympathetic mix of naïveté and creepiness here.
But aside from Hendricks, who’s wasted in a too-brief cameo, it’s the supporting actors that have the most fun. Alessandro Nivola is a hoot as a campy fashion designer, and Keanu Reeves gets some of the movie’s best lines as the manager of the seedy motel where Jesse is staying. Speaking in a deeper register than usual, Reeves plays against dude type and makes a memorably greasy predator who finds Jesse too old to take advantage of, preferring the “real Lolita shit” in the room next door.
This set-up, and the buckets of blood and other bodily fluids that emerge from this candy-colored fever dream, may sound disturbing, but the director means it to be funny, and it is, although not everybody will laugh. Refn has yet to return to the general critical consensus that met his 2011 action movie Drive; the audacious follow up Only God Forgives was widely panned (I loved it). While The Neon Demon occasionally takes too long to weave its spell, and a lot of moviegoers will refuse its vivid dreams, but oh what a spell.
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The Neon Demon
Written and directed by Nicolas Winding Refn
With Elle Fanning, Christina Hendricks, Keanu Reeves
Rated R for disturbing violent content, bloody images, graphic nudity, a scene of aberrant sexuality, and language
117 minutes
Opens today at Landmark Atlantic Plumbing, ArcLight Bethesda and AMC Hoffman
