There are no teary confessionals or admissions of lessons learned here, however: Celeste tumbles directly into it from a day of catastrophic PR blunders and substance abuse, her onstage composure an odd lapse of professional responsibility before, inevitable, she falls apart again once the lights are off.īoth films, then, conclude that the show must go on, though the implications of that moral are far bleaker in Corbet’s film than in Cooper’s: Ally continues because she is bound to her art, Celeste because she is bound to her industry. Vox Lux, like A Star is Born, climaxes with a comeback concert: a full, seamless, blaring half-hour set that Portman barks and dances through with jaw-dropping elan. “I’m a private girl in a public world,” she sings in one of her samey-sounding hits, and it’s one of her few lyrics – otherwise awash with canned self-help mantras – she seems able to express with conviction. ![]() 2018-edition Celeste is still topping the charts with upbeat dance-pop, performed with an impressively robotic proficiency that belies the jangle of nerves, neuroses and addictions this one-time America’s sweetheart has become. Vox Lux doesn’t show the complete transformation: rather, it zooms nearly 20 years forward to the acid-spitting final product. Stacy Martin and Natalie Portman in Vox Lux. Jaggedly cynical, stripped of any semblance of romance, and painted in tones of dull silver where A Star is Born favours California gold, Corbet’s film is effectively the wicked sister of Cooper’s: both portray a gifted young female singer wounded and jaded by the commercial demands of the pop machine, emerging as a different animal in the process. Whether she would so stoically survive the contemporary music industry that engulfs Celeste, the prickly heroine of Brady Corbet’s Vox Lux, is another matter. It’s a world that leaves Ally bruised but not broken, head held high at her final curtain call. The new A Star is Born takes place in a world where bluesy country rockers enthrall Coachella masses and drag-bar patrons alike, where strings-soaked power ballads relaunch careers, and where social media seems not to exist: it may prove the enduring emotional effectiveness of its oft-told story, but as a snapshot of pop culture in 2018, it feels about as lived-in as Gaga’s stick-on eyebrows. Some have accused Cooper’s film of an anti-pop sensibility: not necessarily true, given the film’s own expert populist construction, but its view of emotional catharsis and artistic redemption – all tied up in a stripped-back love song – is romantically old-fashioned. (“Why’d you come around me with an ass like that?” she snaps on one, in a bumping, grinding Saturday Night Live performance intended to signal her lowest creative ebb.)īradley Cooper and Lady Gaga in A Star is Born. That moral hinges on the film’s own rather conservative musical preferences: we’re invited to see I’ll Never Love Again, a supremely well-shaped slab of pop melodrama that any belter from Barbra Streisand to Celine Dion would have similarly nailed in decades past, as a richer, more satisfying artistic statement than any of the sassier R&B-inflected cuts that saw her scale the charts. ![]() By the time she croons, with a pained tremor in her Whitney-style pipes, the weepy ballad I’ll Never Love Again in the film’s finale – to a raptly sympathetic audience mindful of what she has lost along the way – the film aligns itself with the age-old view that great art is born of suffering, and that the best singers channel their life’s pain into their voices. ![]() In Bradley Cooper’s fourth official iteration of A Star is Born, an earthy, working-class nightclub chanteuse played by Lady Gaga is made over, more or less, into Lady Gaga: the mononymous Ally, a metallically polished, millions-selling pop diva whose heart is broken and whose soul is compromised en route to true, unfettered artistry.
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