Leos Carax & Sparks: ANNETTE (2021)

 

The first thing that can't help but jump out in the front of my brain through much of Annette, the return for Leos Carax to features since Holy Motors and the first original filmed musical by Sparks (Ron and Russell Mael), is film trivia; specifically, there's the tidbit in the story (wish it was longer told but what can you do) about the brothers in the Edgar Wright documentary that for a time they tried to get a movie musical made with the famed comic director Jacques Tati but for a number of reasons not expounded on it wasn't to be.  

What came back to me was that the brothers may have had the wrong Jacques in mind all along and should have rung up Demy instead: clearly films like Umbrellas of Cherbourg and Young Girls of Rochefort had to be kicking around somewhere in them when they concocted a sung-through tragic love saga involving an angelic opera singer, her volatile and drunk stand up(?) Comic husband, and the baby they have together who happens to look oddly enough like a marionette (ohhh I get it now: Ann, Cotillard, meets ette... damn I'm dumb). 

It may not be fair to compare how Carax does a sung thru musical to the standard bearer high-water mark that Demy had with those musicals, but there is an example there that Carax and the Maels should have kept in mind: if you're going to follow two people in love, tragic or otherwise, it shouldn't have such a (to use a word Henry McHenry the Driver character says here) abysmal personality at the center of it, and perhaps there could be a little more variety or (sad to say with the Sparks connection) wit or lightness to what is essentially an opera in several acts - I dare say more than three but maybe less than six, who can keep count - where it may mean to be about the surfaces and plasticity and obviousness of fame and glory and how lacking in real emotions those provides but comes up short when it means to depict from early on (as the genuinely exquisite melody goes) two people who love each other so much.  

In other words, Annette is too long, too unwieldy, and probably when I look back on it all a failure.  I wonder wonder I should direct the worst vitriol to something like this that aims pretty high and has some mesmerizing and genuinely clever set pieces, such as the two main comedy scenes where we see Henry at his height and then at his low (Vegas, right), with his audiences like a staggering Greek chorus singing right back at him as he offends and rambles and cajoled on stage, or the puppet of Annette herself which I assume is an animatronic or a real marionette with the strings cgid out, or the interesting supporting performance of Helberg as the "Accompanist" who had more of a past with Ann than he first let on and speaks through his feelings in a scene where he conducts an orchestra in a sweeping series of 360 shots that feels like Carax is more in his element than in other parts of the story (at his worst, he imposes his style on some scenes where it doesn't work).

But for all that does impress, it isn't very good on the whole because the (anti) hero at the center is one of those total bores of a toxic masculine caricature, and while most of this is a sung-thru operatic film there are a few points people just talk and it could've been a good thing to see, you know, Henry and Ann having a simple conversation (the most we get outside of admittedly sexy lovemaking is a tickle scene, which has its own connotations of control in the face of enjoyment and Henry's seeming thrill of that I wish the film had explored more).  

And Driver, dog bless him, is carrying so much of the film on his shoulders that it at times looks like it could collapse under him (thank goodness he has those glorious tree trunks for limbs, to paraphrase John Oliver's running gag, but I digress). He is certainly putting his all into this, and Cotillard brings genuine pathos especially in those little scenes with Annette, but she is wasted in the grand scheme of the story, which is... a whole lot and yet not a lot at the same time.  

That's the thing about the movie: it has this stunning sense of presenting its world throughout, as Carax loves cinema so much that it seeps, as Holy Motors was, into and about its own aesthetic if that makes sense.  Of course it's not a yacht on a real ocean or a real cliff and of course it's not a "real" baby and of course it isn't how babies are born.  That charm can only work so far as the material, and it's too much of a "and then this and then this and then this," so it's never not compelling or captivating and yet at the same time it kind of just ambles - not least of which, especially because, the music itself is singing through exposition without it being more clever. 

Maybe to go back to Demy again, it's all about the tone and how we do or don't relate to the people on screen: if it's deep down a very dark story, that's fine, but you should then even occasionally make it less distanced via this aesthetic of the fantastical.... or not try to make this insufferable douche Henry a seemingly tragic figure.  

I don't know. I sound more like I didn't like this, and ultimately I can't recommend it for the creators falling flat on their faces in a story of fame that is ultimately too familiar.  But Annette is with all of its issues a work of art made by people who aimed for a spectacular experience, and I'd still be happy to pay to see something like this over, oh (looks at AMC app), GI Joe Origins or Jungle Cruise or some shit.  It could even become someone's favorite film, and more power to you if it does.   Or, if it doesn't sound like your cup of baby or Driver or musical where Driver makes a baby a superstar because hey that's how the world works, maybe stay away too.  

PS: Sometimes with a long movie I can't tell exactly what to cut out... here there is absolutely one scene that needed to go to the cutting room floor, which is the number about the six women accusing Henry of harassment. Like okay but if you're going there actually go there, and they never come back to it (it may even be a dream scene). This dude is bad enough without a #metoo sequence dating the movie.