(Leos Carax, 2021, France, rated R, 140 mins)
There's absolutely no one like French filmmaker Leos Carax (not his real name), and if he didn't exist, we would have had to invent him. His singular vision is a bracing tonic in a play-it-safe movie world. It means that he's unafraid to plunge full-bore into ridiculousness, and yet his films never feel like the work of a showoff or a scatterbrain. They feel like the work of Leos Carax.
Annette complicates that pattern by bringing collaboration into play. For his first English-language feature and full-fledged musical--music has always loomed large in his work--Carax teamed up with avant-pop duo Sparks, who cowrote both music and script. It's the Los Angeles duo's second collaborative effort of the year after Edgar Wright's The Sparks Brothers, which is clearly the work of three people, and I mean that in the best of ways, since I never sensed Wright imposing his will on Ron and Russell Mael. He arranged the parts; they provided the raw material. It's great.
Annette opens by breaking the fourth wall as Carax, in a control booth, directs Sparks, in a studio. They launch into "So May We Start?," and then they walk out of the studio, still singing, to encounter stars Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard. The band, stars, and backup singers stroll out of the building and down the street, running into costar Simon Helberg along the way. As the song ends, the story begins. The message is clear: "This is a movie. This is not real life."
In the movie, Cotillard plays opera singer Ann Defrasnoux and Driver plays anti-comedian Henry McHenry, a disheveled, bathrobe-clad performer. She's sleek, he's not--press dub them "The Beauty and the Bastard." Beautifully-lit scenes by DP Caroline Champetier (Holy Motors) of Henry riding his motorcycle through deserted streets at night, sometimes with Ann and sometimes without, bring Carax's Mauvais Sang to mind. Guy likes his bikes.
During a gig, Henry announces his engagement to Ann. The audience lets out a collective gasp. Carax marks the chapters of their love story with excerpts from an excitable Entertainment Tonight-like show called Showbiz News. SBN breaks the news of their wedding, followed by news of Ann's pregnancy.
Duets, like "We Love Each Other So Much," illustrate their relationship, while the backup singers from the prologue often appear to add depth and grandeur. If Cotillard and Driver aren't great singers, they're good enough, much like Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor in Moulin Rouge (soprano Catherine Trottmann lends Ann's opera performances verisimilitude).
Then, Ann gives birth. The backup singers, dressed as hospital workers, sing through her labor. Though the couple reacts to Annette as if she were human, she's an animatronic puppet with jug ears and articulated limbs. This isn't played as Chucky-like horror, though it's certainly disquieting.
In the midst of their bliss, damaging news about Henry starts to make the rounds, but Carax drops this subplot as quickly as he brings it up, only to move into even more disturbing territory as Henry makes a chilling confession on stage that turns the entire audience against him. They express their displeasure in song; he responds in kind. The confession predicts the cataclysmic events to come, though Carax never returns to the accusations against Henry, making me wonder why he brought them up in the first place (Carax suggests that Ann, while half-asleep in her limousine, dreamt up the whole thing).
Annette, meanwhile, grows from a baby into a toddler as her parents' marriage hits the skids. When they take an ocean voyage in an attempt to reconnect, Carax plays with allusions to Pinocchio and Wuthering Heights. The whale-shaped lamp in Annette's room, for instance, may simply have been intended to lend nautical flair to her surroundings, but the combination of wooden child and whale imagery brings Disney's majestic Pinocchio to mind. Similarly, Annette is about to enter the belly of the beast.
Bad things continue to happen. Either Henry doesn't know how to be happy, he isn't happy, or he isn't quite right in the head. All three things can be true. Since his 1984 debut, Boy Meets Girl (starring cinematic alter ego Denis Lavant), Carax's films tend to follow a similar trajectory: men and women fall in love only to find that they're bad for each other. He splits the difference between romance and nihilism.
As she grows older, Annette takes after her mother in revealing a gift for song. Talking will come later. This brings her into contact with Ann's accompanist (Florence Foster Jenkins' Helberg) who has become a conductor. The love story then gives way to a new narrative suffused with jealousy, exploitation, and transference. Though I expected the relationship between Ann and Henry to form the heart of the film, the title explains all: the deeper story involves Henry and Annette, though the moments between the Conductor and the girl prove more affecting than those between the girl and her father for reasons that go beyond musical affinities.
As Annette's red hair grows longer, Henry's shrinks and takes on a silver cast until he ends up looking like an elongated Leos Carax. I suspect it isn't completely coincidental, since Carax had a daughter with Russian-French actress Yekaterina Golubeva (Carax's Herman Melville adaptation Pola X), who died under mysterious circumstances in 2011. An end credit confirms my theory that Sparks' screenplay holds personal resonance: "Pour Nastya," the name of their now-adult daughter.
For all of its visual beauty and musical effervescence, Annette is one of the most downbeat musicals I've ever seen. If the conclusion lets in a little light, unlike Lars von Trier's ultra-gloomy Dancer in the Dark, it's still the story of a damaged person who can't resist dragging everyone he cares about down with him. As ever, though, Carax is no fool, and the sequence that plays over the end credits brings things back to the beginning: "This is a movie. This is not real life"--except it's hard to shake the feeling that it kinda, sorta is--or could've been if Carax didn't get his demons under control.
Annette opens on Friday, August 6, at the Crest in Seattle and Lincoln Square Cinemas in Bellevue. It comes to Amazon Prime on August 20. Images: Henry from Artforum, Sparks from Polygon (Anna Webber/Focus Features), Ann from Amazon Studios, Caroline Champetier shooting Annette from AFC (Kris Dewitte / Facts of Emotions), and cast still from Sony Music.