Nicolas Winding Refn has some bad news for you. It seems that the fashion industry is a vacuous monster that rewards ambition over worth and values youth over experience. Perhaps, you should sit down. There’s more. Plastic surgery is common. Exploitation is rife. The vital components of the system swim through endless vulgarity as blood cells swim through plasma (more about blood in a minute). Next you’ll be telling me politicians don’t always tell the truth.
There are few stunning revelations in the latest damp provocation from Nicolas Winding Refn. Equal parts Giallo All About Eve and butcher's-apron A Star is Born, The Neon Demon casts the luminous Elle Fanning as Jesse, a 16-year-old model recently arrived in a glaringly clean Los Angeles. "I would never call you fat. Others might, but I never would," Christina Hendricks, playing a splendidly icy agent, says to the blonde coat hanger. Cast into the pit, Jesse encounters naked jealousy at every turn. She is what all the "older" girls – anybody over 20 – spend their lives trying to be. They fantasise about consuming her. Maybe they do consume her.
Many of the same people who hated Refn's Only God Forgives will, for perfectly good reasons, feel even more antagonistic towards The Neon Demon. Let us agree, however, that the director is putting in an effort. There is a great deal of Dario Argento in here, but one is also reminded – consider his Bronson in particular – of the extent to which Refn can come across as a mildly sedated Ken Russell. The message may be uncomplicated, but the means of delivery offers endless, increasingly revolting delights.
We begin with a bloodied Fanning draped across a couch in a state of apparent annihilation. We quickly learn that this is an extreme (but still plausible) portfolio shoot in the style of a horror film. The photographer who took the snaps (Karl Glusman from Gaspar Noé's Love) is a tad worried about her.
After all, isn’t LA the sort of place where rituals enacted around neon triangles within triangles – the demon of the title, I assume – lead ultimately to necrophiliac lesbian orgies and the regurgitation of eyeballs? He doesn’t say exactly that, of course, but that’s what ultimately happens. We’ve already had more than a few unmistakable portents. A mountain lion breaks into the motel room where Jesse – when not avoiding Keanu Reeves’s sleazy manager – dreams about a less troubling triumph than she eventually encounters.
The action in The Neon Demon seems random, but it is not carelessly composed. Indeed, every aspect of the production seems fastidiously honed by fanatical craftspeople. For all the chaos, this is a remarkably quiet and still film. Virtually no ambient noise interrupts the silences. The camera is as still as that in a fashion shoot. Cliff Martinez's electronic score is clean and chiselled to unsettling perfection. (It may be his best yet for Refn.)
Fanning is superbly focused as a woman who gradually gains confidence in her own aesthetic power, but she is outshone by the consistently sterling Jenna Malone. Playing a make-up artist with Faustean leanings, she inflects every line with dry menace and couched meaning.
This is tricky subject matter. In its later stages, The Neon Demon becomes a film about how certain women hate certain other women. The presence of Von Trier collaborator Lene Børglum, who co-wrote the script, helps forward the argument that this is a film about the malign results of misogyny rather than a misogynistic film. After all, nobody is quite so creepy as the designer played by Alessandro Nivolo as a class of fabulous David Seaman (it might just be the moustache).
Do you need another reason to attend? Be aware that a Daily Mail journalist who hasn't seen The Neon Demon has urged the British Board of Film Classification to ban this sick filth. I can think of no stronger recommendation.
