These
models have practically zero percent body fat, but they can still produce
plenty of body horror. That’s “horror,” as in scary movies. If you’re looking
for vicarious thrills and chills, a Nicolas Winding Refn joint really isn’t for
you, but if you want to gawk at lurid strangeness, the Danish director delivers
more than ever. There are indeed dire consequences in store for a small town
catwalk ingénue, who descends into the darkly sexualized, increasingly surreal
fashion world in Refn’s Neon Demon (trailer here), which opens this
Friday in New York.
Fresh
off the bus from Bumbletucky or wherever, Jesse immediately falls in with Ruby,
a conspicuously interested lesbian makeup artist and her two evil blonde model
pals, Gigi and Sarah—or is it Sarah and Gigi? Much to her new model frienemies’
shock, Jesse is immediately signed by a high-power agency and starts booking
what they consider “their gigs.” Her boss admits she is raw and undeveloped,
but she just has “the Look.”
Within
the context of the narrative (such as it is), Elle Fanning’s Jesse is a sixteen-year-old
not really passing for nineteen. However, she looks like a fourteen-year-old
zonked out on Nyquil. If that “Look” revs your engine, you should probably be
on some sort of registry.
Regardless,
guys seem to swoon over her like she is the second coming of Marilyn Monroe. That
includes the loyal Dean, who follows her around like a neutered hound dog and
Hank, the predatory junkyard dog who manages the fleabag Pasadena motel she is
still staying in after being signed to a modelling contract by Mad Men’s Christine Hendricks, one of
the few women in the film who does not look like a malnourished heroin addict.
There
is some creepy tension and some bat-scat lunacy in Neon, but there are also plenty scenes fixated on Jesse as she
bites her lip and stares into her navel. Frankly, it is about a focused as Only God Forgives (meaning not very),
but it lacks the electrifying presence of Vithaya Pansringarm. Perversely, it
is Keanu Reeves who makes the strongest impression as Hell’s own Motelier. He
is so unsettling, Refn should have called an audible and rearranged the film
into a more conventional Bates Motel-style horror movie.
