Annette (2021)
dir. Leos Carax
Rated: R
image: ©2021 Amazon Studios
If you know anything about Ron and Russell Mael of the band Sparks, you know they’re only interested in pleasing themselves when it comes to their art. (If you don’t know anything about Sparks, you can learn quite a lot, like I did, from the new Edgar Wright documentary about the band, called The Sparks Brothers.) If you know who Leos Carax is, it’s likely you’ve seen his 2012 film Holy Motors, so you know how visually inventive and wacked-out his singular aesthetic is.
This trio of artists have come together to create a sui generis piece of cinema in Annette. A sort of rock opera by way of the French musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg – Carax also hails from France – Annette is by turns uplifting, depressing, silly, and hopelessly bleak. That wild mixture makes for a heady experience in certain moments, but it also never quite gels into a cohesive whole. Add to that a lead performance from Adam Driver that is, while bold and an example of an actor challenging himself, emotionally distant, which made it hard for me to connect with.
Ron and Russell Mael have been trying to connect with a filmmaker for decades in order to collaborate on a movie project. They even ill-advisedly appeared in a 1977 disaster movie called Rollercoaster, about a mad bomber loose in an amusement park. Their first attempt at making a movie was with legendary comedic French filmmaker Jacques Tati. (If you haven’t seen Tati’s Play Time, do yourself a favor, it’s one of the best comedies ever made.) Their second was an ill-fated adaptation of a Japanese manga with Tim Burton set to direct. Both projects fell through, but after meeting director Leos Carax at a film festival, they were ready to try again to get a film project featuring their music into production.
The story that the brothers Mael crafted for Annette centers around wildly popular stand-up comic Henry McHenry. His on-stage act is acerbic and brooding, like if Bill Hicks had made it big. Henry off-stage is also acerbic and brooding. After a whirlwind romance, McHenry marries famous opera singer Ann Defrasnoux. The two have a daughter, Annette. The couple’s marriage spirals after six women come forward with #MeToo stories about Henry’s past. I’ll have to stop there, because the movie takes ever-increasing twists until the very end.
Oh, did I mention that baby Annette (and, later in the story, toddler Annette) is portrayed by a wooden marionette puppet? I’m not sure if it was an animatronic, pure CGI, or a mix of both, but the vibes this little creature give off are a mix between Pinocchio and Chucky. It’s also not the most subtle metaphor. Subtext becomes text as little Annette becomes a puppet in the rocky relationship between Henry and Ann. The little puppet girl becomes more of a pawn to Henry after a tragic accident(?) changes their dynamic forever.
Driver played another father whose child gets caught in the middle of a relationship falling apart in Marriage Story. Annette is Marriage Story on psychedelic mushrooms. It gets off to a rousing start with the opening number, and best song in the film, So May We Start, featuring Sparks and the cast of the film all singing together. It’s an infectiously catchy tune, as are about half of the songs making up the wall-to-wall sung dialog in Annette.
Throwing the audience off balance immediately, Carax stages this first number in a recording studio. Sparks is warming up, and the rest of the cast and crew are ready to roll. In an inventive linking of sight and sound, the director ties specific visual effects, fraction-of-a-second fades to black, to the soundtrack, such as a cable getting plugged into an amp. Sparks and Carax then take a sledgehammer to the fourth wall when we figure out that the filmmakers are telling us with their first song that they are ready to start the movie. The lyrics tell us about their hopes and dreams for the project:
“They hope that it goes the way it's supposed to go
There's fear in them all but they can't let it show
They're underprepared but that may be enough
The budget is large but still, it's not enough
…
We've fashioned a world, a world built just for you
A tale of songs and fury with no taboo”
Like with much of the movie, and Sparks’s discography, these lyrics have a biting wit and droll sense of humor. In The Sparks Brothers documentary, we learn that the Mael brothers – particularly Ron, who writes most, if not all, of the band’s lyrics – are mildly pissed off that their music isn’t taken more seriously because of the humor in their work. Frank Zappa experienced the same frustrations.
They work this anxiety out through their character Henry, who laments and rages about Ann’s opera career sailing to new heights as his comedy career stagnates. In another example of the movie’s bonkers aesthetic, any time Henry is on stage, his audience sings in unison to him, giving him praise or insults or asking him questions.
Like with the Pinocchio baby, it’s not the most subtle exploration of themes. The Sparks Brothers documentary covers Ron’s preoccupation with feeling like an outsider, which he expresses through the characters in his songs, and sure enough, Driver’s Henry laments being a lonely outsider whose art isn’t taken seriously enough.
But I can forgive a lot when art is made with enough style and an inimitable creative stamp. Annette has that twofold because of the collaboration that birthed it. Sparks’s songs are mostly catchy and always fascinating to listen to, even when they become maudlin. The medley Bon Voyage/We Love Annette/We’re Traveling Around the World has a bubbly effervescence, even as it covers over some dark events in the story. The song We Love Each Other So Much has a melancholic beauty to it.
When the music syncs up with Leos Carax’s distinctive visual imagination, magic happens. During one unforgettable moment, Annette’s tiny, wooden baby face is painted like a clown. It’s a hypnotic image. Carax is a master at creating surreal, almost ineffable tableaux.
During one moment in the film, after a terrible tragedy has befallen Ann, Henry, in his impenetrable solipsism, declares, “It’s really happening to me.” Driver is weird and great (or should it be weirdly great? Or greatly weird?) here as Henry. It ended up wearing me down by the end, but his commitment to Henry’s brooding and angry outlook is absolute. The character is a narcissist, and Driver’s coldness left me feeling like the outsider.
In a major disappointment, Ann, played by the mesmerizing Marion Cotillard, is an afterthought. Her character, like so many female characters before her, serves only to give the protagonist – and I use that term in its loosest possible sense – his motivation. Still, in the few brief standout moments the movie gives her, Cotillard is impossible to look away from when she’s on screen.
The episodic nature of Annette hinders it from feeling like a cohesive project. One subplot involves Ann’s accompanist, who has a romantic past with the opera singer, lamenting his failure in music. He also becomes entangled with Henry when the father decides to exploit Annette’s newly-discovered ethereal singing voice. The character, known only as The Accompanist in the credits, ultimately feels superfluous, but he is included in some memorable sequences. Actor Simon Helberg, best known as Wolowitz on the atrocious sitcom The Big Bang Theory, does a damn fine job (both acting and singing) as The Accompanist. The character’s main theme, I’m an accompanist, is another fourth-wall breaking number in which the character dreams of becoming a conductor.
When he (mild spoiler) achieves his goal, we are introduced to his new station in his artistic career with a bravura 360° camera tracking shot. As The Accompanist conducts his orchestra, the camera furiously circles him again and again. When the camera faces him, he sings to us about how he has achieved his goal. As it begins to move toward the side of his face, he quickly tells us to hold on, before getting back to his work for a few seconds as the camera sweeps behind his head and back around again. It’s an inventive and delightful bit of filmmaking.
I’m ultimately mixed on Annette. It’s a radical act of avant-garde filmmaking from three one-of-a-kind creative talents. It also gets bogged down with a solipsistic narcissist main character and frankly becomes a real bummer, especially in its final minutes. Sparks and Carax also don’t do themselves any favors by using the #MeToo movement as a cheap and easy plot device to get their characters into position for the third act.
But, I’m a sucker for artists (and art) swinging for the fences. There is nothing more exciting than a piece of art that couldn’t possibly exist but for the unique creative force(s) behind it. Sparks and Leos Carax have certainly created such a piece in Annette. Knowing now what I do about Sparks (and this presumably also applies to Carax), if they’re happy with it, they couldn’t give less of a damn if I liked it or not. Creating exactly what they want, no matter what anyone else thinks of it, is enough for them.
Why it got 3.5 stars:
- If you like weird, wild, and totally gonzo art, like I do, Annette is worth your time. I had some issues with the main character and the clashing tones of Leos Carax and Sparks’s collaboration, but I’ll be damned if I don’t admire the hell out of what they’re doing here.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- The most fun the movie has is with several short sequences where the TMZ/Extra-style press covers the goings-on of Henry and Ann. The fictitious “news outlet” in Annette is called Showbiz News, and each segment had me laughing heartily at the fun they poke at the stupidity of celebrity gossip outlets. I was forced to wonder, though, where the vitriol was coming from. Surely Ron and Russell Mael and Leos Carax aren’t targets of this kind of coverage, right?
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- I think I counted four audience walkouts during the press/advance screening I attended. Clearly, Annette isn’t everyone’s cup of tea.