Annette

Simon Helberg, Marion Cotillard and Adam Driver in Annette

Leos Carax's Annette is an overblown folly. a white elephant and a horse of a different color. Yet, I was often entranced by Carax's attempt to pull off this foolhardy musical. After the success d'estime of Holy Motors, Carax must have been vexed as to how to follow up a film that was both a masterpiece and a summation of both his career and a life long artistic collaboration with Denis Lavant. Annette is not the unalloyed triumph that Holy Motors is, but it is a bold and singular work.

So bold and singular that it has predictably elicited both hosannas and brickbats. I suspect this will ever more be so. Carax's artistic choices are so audacious that the viewer is forced to either go with the film's flow or smack one's noggin in dumbfound horror. Take the decision to make the title character a puppet for most of the film. Annette is the child of the main characters, angry comic Henry McHenry (Adam Driver) and soprano Ann Defrasnoux (Marion Cotillard). In making the child a puppet, Carax has opened himself up to ridicule. As many commentators have noted, the puppet Annette bears a resemblance to Chucky, the killer doll from the Child's Play slasher franchise. The choice seems off-putting, but it is deliberately so. It pays off during the denouement when Annette morphs into a real child and repudiates her father. Heretofore, Annette has been merely a performer for her father, a helpless innocent whose strings are easily pulled. Condemned and castoff by his only child and society as a whole, Henry is finally able to see Annette as an individual who has her own needs and desires.

Carax on set with Annette puppet

Performance, in all its modes is the main theme of Annette. A dichotomy exists between the high art of Ann's craft and the more vulgar and immediate 'comic' monologues of Henry. Both performers prowl a stage set though Ann's opens, significantly, up to a dream like forest. The heroines of opera warble sublimely and succumb tragically for the edification of an adoring public. This mirrors the fate of Ann herself in the film. Henry McHenry is the embodiment of the angry young comic, reeking of toxic, adolescent masculinity. He channels this into an onstage persona lapped by a raucous public in Pavlovian fashion. Henry ends up despising his audience and his self. We have seen this Byronic schtick and know it will not end well. This is the reason for Henry McHenry's redundant moniker.

Adam Driver has obviously studied many of the hoody wearing comics of the day. This, along with a dash of Eminem, informs his bravura performance of mic cord snapping ferocity and self-loathing. Cotillard is good, too, but has little to do except offer herself as an emblem of feminine suffering. Driver has already showed off his vocal chops in Marriage Story and is up to the challenge here. Cotillard is adequate vocally, but her consonants sound mushy; much like Claudine Longet. Wisely, her vocals in the operatic sections are dubbed.

Rock versus Opera

The songs and score are by the pop-rock brother duo Sparks. I have a few of their albums, but, on the whole find their work vacuous and arch. However, they seem to work best with strong collaborators ( such as Tony Visconti, Giorgio Moroder and Jane Wiedlin) and Annette is shorn of their excesses or, rather, it gives them ample room to explore their many ideas which always seemed crammed into forty minute LPs. Baroque and rococo are adjectives that come to mind while listening to A Woofer in Tweeter's Clothing and Indiscreet, chock full of bizarre time signatures, over extended bridges and Russell Mael's dog whistle tenor. The brothers Mael Achilles heel has always been melody. In Annette, the love theme is a dull echo of Kurt Weill's (and Ogden Nash!) "Speak Low". 

Still, the Sparks do use choral asides well. What was once a purely musical project probably benefitted being turned into a feature film. Carax seems to understand both the pleasures and absurdities of the rock opera form. Annette has been likened to the 60's Jacques Demy - Michel Legrand musicals (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, The Young Girls of Rochefort), but a better comparison is to Bruno Dumont's two Joan of Arc rock opera. I would give the edge to Dumont simply for coherence. Annette falls just outside cinematic paradise, but it has many interesting strands: apples, apes, Simon Helberg. It will stand up to multiple reviews.