Nicolas Winding Refn's The Neon Demon elevates itself above recent cautionary Hollywood duds like Paul Schrader's The Canyons and David Cronenberg's Maps to the Stars by virtue of: A) not taking itself very seriously, and B) having a core of real anger anyway. Perhaps it helps that the film's director is Danish and has always operated at a distance from American cinema — this is an American/Danish/French co-production, with money from Amazon — while clearly yearning to find a place in it. The film's ideas are banal if basically truthful. Sixteen-year-old girls shouldn't set out to be models, especially without parental guidance. Hollywood is full of women who compete with each other and who spend their days getting plastic surgery done in an attempt to look ever younger. Its men are a bunch of lechers and prima donnas. There remains something essentially mean-spirited about Refn's sensibility — this is a film where a man proposes pimping out a 13-year-old — but he retains a welcome sense of fun, laughing as his characters' dreams crash and burn.
Immediately after turning 16, Jesse (Elle Fanning) arrives in L.A. to become a supermodel. She looks genuinely innocent; while Fanning is obviously at least a few years older than her character, her youth is believable. Immediately, she attracts competition as well as a much-desired photo shoot with a sleazy male photographer who covers her in gold paint. Her career takes off. She still lives in a decrepit Pasadena motel, where a mountain lion barges into her room one night. The motel manager (Keanu Reeves) seems like a real piece of work. She has few friends. When a colleague breaks a window, she cuts Jesse's hand on a piece of glass and then licks up the blood, bringing up the overtones of vampirism that will dominate the film's finale.
Drive is the only Refn film I've fully enjoyed. I think that's because it brought out his talent for mimicry, with skillful imitations of Michael Mann and Walter Hill's The Driver. Even Drive's biggest shock is lifted from Takeshi Kitano's Hana-bi. Yet somehow it all works as a seamless package, down to Cliff Martinez's excellent score and its evocation of disco, synth-pop and Tangerine Dream. Refn's earlier stabs at originality, like the Pusher trilogy, never quite hit their marks.
The Neon Demon is just as derivative as Drive, but it treats its influences in a more diffuse manner. This time around, Gaspar Noé's Enter the Void and David Lynch's Mulholland Drive seem to be on Refn's mind. There's a visit to a nightclub that synthesizes imagery from both films.
It says something about Refn's crudity that the fantasy violence of his film's opening scene does indeed turn out to be foreshadowing. But Refn avoids obvious scares, at least until the film loses its interest in making sense in the final third. At first, Refn seems to be trying to prove he's less of a sleazeball than his characters. When a photographer asks Jesse to take off her clothes — and yes, that means bra and panties — Refn figures out how to frame the scene so that we don't see more than the very top of Fanning's torso and back. When he does show nudity later on, Refn's instincts are more painterly than pornographic. (Though the film's lesbian sex scene is a misfire.) Refn indeed has an artist's eye, framing items as banal as a bathroom's broken window with grace.
As a storyteller, Refn — along with his co-writers Mary Laws and Polly Stenham — seems to be catering to people who write for websites about the occult symbolism of films with weird imagery. Is the mountain lion that pops up in Jesse's room a shape-shifting vampire, or the real thing? The fact that we later see a painting of a big cat in a vampire's lair suggests the former interpretation. But at heart, The Neon Demon is basically Showgirls with a lot of arthouse trappings thrown on for protection. Rather than the limited run where it might find an appreciative audience, distributor Broad Green Pictures is sending it into America's multiplexes, where the most common response is likely to be "Huh?" This is closer to a midnight movie than a conventional genre film, and if you can appreciate it on that level, you're far more likely to enjoy it.
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