Annette hit theaters in a limited release on Aug. 6 and is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
Glam rock meets surrealism in Annette, a dreamlike musical that combines the lunatic flair of director Leos Carax with the art pop stylings of Sparks — brothers Ron and Russell Mael — who both wrote and composed the film. Creatively, it’s a match made in heaven, telling the story of a Hollywood couple who starts out similarly well-matched before being consumed by celebrity pitfalls. It’s a tale of passion front-loaded with enrapturing imagery, one that soon slips into a lurid saga of ego and exploitation that, while far less visually dazzling, is no less strange and melancholy. The story might have warranted comparisons to the many versions of A Star is Born, were it not for its peculiarities — chief among them, the couple’s exceptionally gifted newborn, Annette, who happens to be played by a puppet.
Adam Driver plays Henry McHenry, a tortured comedian whose stage act is as avant-garde as the film itself. His set, which walks an uncomfortable line between reality and fiction, is most often about death, a constant anxiety throughout the film, which also manifests in the many stage performances delivered by his wife, Ann Defrasnoux, a famous actress played by Marion Cotillard. Both performers frequently die on stage, but off it, they attempt to live life to the fullest. Theirs is both a high-profile romance, which they perform for the paparazzi, and a sensuous one behind closed doors, resulting in both intimate playfulness, and some incredibly inventive and intoxicating musical sex scenes, in which writhing naked bodies become increasingly entwined with both the rhythm and with each other.
Annette is not a traditional musical with choreographed dance. However, it features thoughtful choreography between the camera and its subjects, with Carax and cinematographer Caroline Champetier turning even mundane interactions into out-of-this-world musical interludes, the kind that would feel poetic even on mute. The film often frames Henry and Ann in relation to the public, whether by capturing their locked gaze across a sea of photographers, or by making their respective stage audiences a key part of the musical segments. The characters’ perspectives on the public are just as important as the public’s perspective on them, whether told through brief, tongue-in-cheek celebrity news broadcasts, or unbroken wide shots that capture Henry traipsing across the stage, as seen from the eyes in the balcony. The camera also has a particular affinity for the film’s only major supporting character (the only one who isn’t a puppet, anyway), a music conductor played by Simon Helberg, who seems hung up on Ann, and whose sincerity clashes with the ugliness underlying her tale of stardom. As he directs his orchestra, the camera often spins around him in close-up, swaying in tandem with the music. While Helberg features only in a handful of scenes, his performance stands out in the way it harbours a deep, unrequited longing.
Movement and music are just as key to Annette as stillness; the viewer is often kept at an arm’s length from Henry during his act, which is punctuated by eerie silence. This creates a sense of mystery about him. Before he steps on stage in his unkempt green robe — part of his disheveled stage persona — he shadow-boxes with his hood up, like a prize fighter about to step out beneath arena lights. There’s an enormity to his performances, scenes of which are interrupted only by brief, dreamy, jittery shots of Ann on a stage of her own, her bright red hair clashing with the blue pillars of the sets around her. She’s never far from Henry’s thoughts. When they step in and out of each other’s orbits, the film captures this transition through its lighting and set design; the sickly, green world of musical stage comedy is Henry’s realm, while Ann resides in the more polished, bright blue world of highbrow opera.
The clash between lowbrow and highbrow lies at the heart of Sparks’ entire campy repertoire. Their lyrics for the film are repetitive and often thuddingly literal, but each composition creates a winding musical path that turns the words into texture. Songs like the simple love ballad “We Love Each Other So Much,” in which the title is repeated ad nauseam, begin to feel like a chant or an echoing promise (there are plenty of similar earworms to be found, especially when Ann and Henry sing to or about Annette). It also helps that Cotillard and Driver are tremendous actors, who inject each aria with physical and emotional desire, even though Driver isn’t the most effective singer. Western musicals tend to have an aversion to playback singing — a common element in Indian cinema, where characters’ singing voices are dubbed by professional singers — and since the number of Hollywood musicals has declined in recent decades, a good singing voice is no longer a prerequisite to stardom. Annette, while a co-production between France, Germany, and Belgium, remains at the mercy of this backdrop (warts and all), given its Hollywood cast and setting. Driver’s singing voice is average, and only sounds like nails on a chalkboard during one specific number which requires emotional belting. But for the most part, he and Helberg are saddled with songs that require them to speak or whisper. They excel during more conversational numbers, while allowing Cotillard to impress both as Ann, the opera actress, and as the voice of Annette, the supernaturally gifted puppet.
Annette is a stunning creation, a marionette that appears to move independently and is designed with wide-eyed emotions in mind. She has her mother’s voice and dyed red hair, and her name, Ann-ette, even suggests that she’s a little version of Ann (coincidentally, the fact that she’s a marionette also makes her a little version of Marion Cotillard). However, while Annette might seem like an opportunity for endless puns — her name may even be a shortened version of “marionette” — her presence is far more thoughtfully conceived. She embodies not only Ann’s hopes and dreams through the traits they share, but Henry’s fears of artificiality and his controlling nature, especially as his success begins to be overshadowed by Ann’s. However, what ultimately sells Annette as a living, breathing character is undoubtedly Driver and Cotillard’s commitment to the bit. Both actors, even though they’re more than adept at emoting through speech, shine most when they react, and think, and consider, as if the way they ponder their feelings (about Annette, and about each other) is what helps those feelings radiate outwards. Once again, the words feel secondary.
Stages appear frequently in the story, but the film isn’t trying to adapt the medium of stage musicals for the screen (as movie musicals often do). Rather, it seeks to adapt the screen, as a fabric, to the medium of music, as if to blend the two together. On occasion, the brightness of the frame shifts with the beat, while sonic distortions manifest as choppy images fading into one another. For every literal, single-minded lyric, Carax introduces a multitude of overlapping visual ideas, and he ties sound and picture inexorably together. Even the editing, by Nelly Quettier, follows suit. Rather than simply cutting on the beat, like a modern pop music video, the film holds on long, unbroken takes, and it cuts only in order to shift between ideas. One choice in particular feels emblematic of this approach, a transition from soothing classical music to thrashing electric guitar, marked by a hard cut from a stroll through the woods to a leather-clad bike ride, all within the same song and all while maintaining the same romantic mood. The film’s more serious second half doesn't feature as many of these flourishes — it’s comparatively restrained — though one can hardly call it conventional.
The film, while certainly fresh in approach, calls back to earlier works by Carax. Its opening scene in particular — the number “So May We Start,” in which Sparks, Carax and the cast appear as themselves and ask for permission to perform — evokes the accordion interlude from Carax’s hyper-energetic masterpiece Holy Motors. In both cases, the music builds as an ever-growing parade of performers marches towards the camera in an unbroken, momentous take. Meanwhile, Ann’s introduction in the film, in which she wears a skincare facemask, bears a sly resemblance to the late actress Édith Scob — not only her masked appearance in Holy Motors, but in the 1960 Scob classic that it called back to in the first place, Eyes Without a Face. Carax, who fills Annette with charming, old-world special effects, like obviously-fake rear projections, embeds Annette into the history of cinema, and in the process, embeds Sparks within that history too. Carax has been making films since the 1980s, but Annette, which began as a concept album, is Sparks’ first film project to see the light of day, after failed productions with Jaques Tati in the 1970s and Tim Burton in the 1990s. That Sparks are among the first people to appear in the film feels like a well-earned victory lap, in which they rightfully stake their claim as long-time admirers of postmodern and avant-garde cinema, whose acts have always felt like they were on the peripheries of the medium, just waiting to break in. It turns out Tinseltown is big enough for the both of them.
An oblique, ethereal musical that runs the visual gamut, Annette captures the enormity of love through gentle silhouettes, and the corrosive power of jealousy through devastating storms.
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