An angry comedian fails to “kill it” with his audience, a breathy opera singer dies on stage every night, their torrid affair is a whirlwind of sex and romance, their prodigious child is presented as a creepy puppet, and their collective love may be torn apart by the abyss of fame. Qui, “Annette,” is another weird, dreamy, surreal vision from French maverick filmmaker Leos Carax (“Holy Motors,” “Pola X”). Yet, this time it’s a dark fairy tale musical fantasia created by the eccentric artpop band Sparks (Ron and Russel Mael, conveniently just feted in the Edgar Wright doc “The Sparks Brothers”), who wrote the original story and music.
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It’s an odd film and a fascinating one—narratively simplistic, artistically complex—at times ravishing and then puzzling, much like the enigmatic films of Carax and the idiosyncratic music of Sparks. However, at two hours and two minutes, it will certainly test the patience of mainstream audiences and, to be fair, it’s oddly not as perfect a marriage as one would assume given both Sparks and Carax’s affinities for melding the bizarre with the sincere.
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After a jubilant, meta, self-reflexive prologue with Sparks in the recording studio announcing the beginning of the movie—not unlike an operatic prelude, but also typical self-deprecating Sparks prefacing fanfare (“The authors are here so let’s not show disdain / the authors are here and they’re a little vain”)—“Annette” begins in earnest, but also in media res, and gearing down in tone towards the somber. The “Boy Meets Girl” susceptibilities of Carax’s past (the name of his debut film) are tweaked slightly as the meet-cute proclivities of his early work are eschewed for l’amour fou.
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Henry McHenry (Adam Driver) and Ann (Marion Cotillard) are the aforementioned celebrity power couple of comedy and opera. Their affair becomes closely followed tabloid fodder, and soon they become pregnant after many steamy depictions of lovemaking that are sometimes hot and sometimes ridiculously outlandish. (There’s perhaps no greater offbeat laugh in the movie than Driver performing cunnilingus on Cotillard while they both sing sweetly, “We love each other so much.”) Yet, when Ann’s fame begins to grow and Henry’s struggles, they fall out of sync, and the toxic male insecurities of the comedian are triggered towards self-destruction. On top of it all, the baby, Annette (literally, a grotesquely strange-looking puppet that will surely puzzle some audience members), is eventually revealed to be a gifted musical prodigy whose fame will outstrip nearly everyone on the planet (Simon Helberg co-stars as a rival musician and friend of the family).
To say more is to tip towards plot spoilers, but for all its inexplicable presentations, sometimes nightmarish, sometimes poetic, the “Annette” story is very archetypal and straightforward: it’s a tragic love story about the perils of fame. Yet, it’s also metaphorically (and sometimes figuratively), also about the monsters that men become, the loves that haunt and never leave us, and the exploitation of wunderkind child sensations. “Annette” also flirts with some #MeToo and toxic white male ideas about aggrieved males—a distracting element in the film as it doesn’t go there— but really, it’s more about self-loathing men that feel as if they are tragically unlovable (a Sparks-ian theme throughout their music: upending love song cliches by never getting the girl). And one can argue the all-male perspective of the film robs it of its full potential—this is more an Adam Driver film than it is a Marion Cotillard one.
To properly understand (and appreciate) the delicate, slippery sensibilities of this unusual collaboration—this theatrical, melodramatic and ironic rock (pop) opera musical which opens the 2021 Cannes Film Festival this week— you must understand (and appreciate) the oddball, multilayered nature of its writers, Sparks and their uncanny ability to thread the needle between the absurd and the profound (arguably a universe Carax is not unfamiliar with either). An acquired taste (though catchy AF once you get over the hump), Sparks mostly confused audiences not sophisticated enough to enjoy their esoteric cinematic music, often operating on several multi-faceted levels of irony, wit, and the razor-sharp line between playful, wry insincerity and paradoxically, undisputable feeling.
Thus, it will not be at all surprising if many audiences are similarly left baffled. “Annette” occupies that somewhat inscrutable avant-garde space. And if the film were an escalator that took you to the top of its kaleidoscopic filmic fantasia, it would come with a warning to keep that all in mind and, please be careful with your step as you proceed (though it does have a welcoming song in the opening musical prelude).
“Annette” is a film where characters repeat the ostensibly cheesy refrain, “We Love Each Other So Much” while holding hands skipping through the park or gazing deeply into each other’s eyes—something that may seem corny and ridiculous to the uninitiated— but is part of the complex Sparks-ian contract. They’re both taking the piss out of the star-crossed lovers musical concept and illogically embracing it wholeheartedly. And Carax, a similarly playful and mysterious magician and trickster, is more than happy to go along for the ride while enriching it all with his chimerical inclinations.
While “Annette” has the DNA of Sparks all over it, Carax’s fingerprints are all over too (and there’s a kind of tension in authorship throughout where the film feels more Sparks-ian, but then more Carax-esque and back and forth). Adam Driver, in many ways (terrific in the film, btw), makes a nice American stand-in for a younger, taller Dennis Lavant (Carax’s usual muse) with more hair, and his character Henry spends much of the movie in a familiar stripe of holy motors green. There’s even a similar beauty and beast quality from Lavant and Eva Mendes in Carax’s last film. Many of his signature traits are evident, too, from his silent film influences to his trademark portrayal of heartsick lovers and more (Stephen Sondheim and Brian De Palma’s “Phantom of the Paradise” also feel like similarly unconventional touchstones).
“Annette” vaguely upends the “A Star Is Born” boy-meets-girl, boy-and-girl-get-famous, it-all-ends-tragically paradigm. Still, its overall concerns seem coincidental and/or completely disinterested with those films, aside from the archetypes available to subvert in its own phantastic ways. Not as intoxicatingly fantastical as “Holy Motors,” nor as delightful as Edgar Wright’s recent Sparks documentary (to be fair, the latter is a different beast), “Annette” still swirls with the fever dream energy of Leos Carax and the witty, catchy odd songs of the brothers Mael. It feels like an odd choice for an opening film at Cannes, too (and as an Amazon release, for that matter), but never underestimate the French’s sympathy towards the perversely peculiar. [B]
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