Leos Carax's first English-language feature and my first Carax picture in general, so I won't speak to any of his directorial tendencies, of which I know next to nothing, and ditto the Sparks, but will try to keep it simple and perhaps end up misdirected. To me, "Annette," despite being released in 2021 and by Amazon Studios, seems very much in the tradition of the French New Wave--like a Jean-Luc Godard disciple from Cannes to Hollywood, still playing the same iconoclastic and deconstructive beats.
In a gender reversal of "Breathless" (1960), the woman (Marion Cotillard) is French and the men (Adam Driver and, shedding "The Big Bang Theory" sitcom caricature, Simon Helberg) are American. She's the real artist, and they're exploitative brutes: one a stand-up comic and the other an accompanist wannabe conductor. Their offspring is a puppet, the eponymous Annette, the marionette. Make of that what you will, but Driver's jester is the protagonist here, and so we may just be seeing his daughter through his eyes. In ironic deconstructive style given its French director financed by Americans, the Americans in the movie literally speak-sing what they're doing when performing. Driver doesn't tell jokes on stage; he describes how he's doing jokes and instructs the audience when to laugh. Cotillard and her daughter sing, too, but it's the operatic performance--not merely the performance about the performance. Not just in the sense of a Thomas H. Ince or Natalie Wood on yachts, the American is a killer, of art--the most groan-inducingly angelic and innocent sort, to boot. The entire facade crumbles, drones descending, puppet stringed Lady Gaga style, on the most ostentatious of American stages, the Super Bowl halftime show.
To drive home the point that this is art about making art, the entire picture is made self-aware and blatantly artificial, to alienate the spectator from the comfort of the fluff of traditional Hollywood musicals. The picture begins with an elaborate one-take of the cast exiting a music-recording studio, changing wardrobes as they sing, "So May We Start," lest anyone forget they're watching a movie. The series of Annette marionettes, intentionally-unbelievable rear-screen projections, interruptions of tabloid exposition, and, of course, the singing of the integrated-musical genre work on the same level. Comically, they even sing during sex. Moreover, the songs are lyrically repetitive and rock scored as if to even subvert expectations of the usual musical escapism. In the end, Driver completely breaks the fourth wall, acknowledging the camera and audience--just as his character did within the narrative with his interactions with the audience for his stand-up. Something that, again ironically, Cotillard's character didn't do on the opera stage until the curtain call.
That all this heightened artifice reflexively calling attention to its own illusion is oft visually splendid and musically sometimes catchy is a compelling dichotomy, both as hostile as Driver and as inviting as Cotillard in interacting with their respective characters' audiences and rather daring one to believe this is about characters and story, perhaps even saying something profound about the nature of celebrity or some such thing. I suppose, "Annette" might have a hopeful implication, though, now that the Americans and French have married and procreated, so to speak, to move past feigned nationalist claims, as if either country ever had that much more of a claim to capitalist fluff or the postmodern avant-garde. Then again, these are the states whose cinematic diatribes go all the way back to the art form's origins with such overblown divisions as Edison or Lumière... Pathé or the Edison Trust... Hollywood or national art cinema... film and cinema or digital and streaming.
In a gender reversal of "Breathless" (1960), the woman (Marion Cotillard) is French and the men (Adam Driver and, shedding "The Big Bang Theory" sitcom caricature, Simon Helberg) are American. She's the real artist, and they're exploitative brutes: one a stand-up comic and the other an accompanist wannabe conductor. Their offspring is a puppet, the eponymous Annette, the marionette. Make of that what you will, but Driver's jester is the protagonist here, and so we may just be seeing his daughter through his eyes. In ironic deconstructive style given its French director financed by Americans, the Americans in the movie literally speak-sing what they're doing when performing. Driver doesn't tell jokes on stage; he describes how he's doing jokes and instructs the audience when to laugh. Cotillard and her daughter sing, too, but it's the operatic performance--not merely the performance about the performance. Not just in the sense of a Thomas H. Ince or Natalie Wood on yachts, the American is a killer, of art--the most groan-inducingly angelic and innocent sort, to boot. The entire facade crumbles, drones descending, puppet stringed Lady Gaga style, on the most ostentatious of American stages, the Super Bowl halftime show.
To drive home the point that this is art about making art, the entire picture is made self-aware and blatantly artificial, to alienate the spectator from the comfort of the fluff of traditional Hollywood musicals. The picture begins with an elaborate one-take of the cast exiting a music-recording studio, changing wardrobes as they sing, "So May We Start," lest anyone forget they're watching a movie. The series of Annette marionettes, intentionally-unbelievable rear-screen projections, interruptions of tabloid exposition, and, of course, the singing of the integrated-musical genre work on the same level. Comically, they even sing during sex. Moreover, the songs are lyrically repetitive and rock scored as if to even subvert expectations of the usual musical escapism. In the end, Driver completely breaks the fourth wall, acknowledging the camera and audience--just as his character did within the narrative with his interactions with the audience for his stand-up. Something that, again ironically, Cotillard's character didn't do on the opera stage until the curtain call.
That all this heightened artifice reflexively calling attention to its own illusion is oft visually splendid and musically sometimes catchy is a compelling dichotomy, both as hostile as Driver and as inviting as Cotillard in interacting with their respective characters' audiences and rather daring one to believe this is about characters and story, perhaps even saying something profound about the nature of celebrity or some such thing. I suppose, "Annette" might have a hopeful implication, though, now that the Americans and French have married and procreated, so to speak, to move past feigned nationalist claims, as if either country ever had that much more of a claim to capitalist fluff or the postmodern avant-garde. Then again, these are the states whose cinematic diatribes go all the way back to the art form's origins with such overblown divisions as Edison or Lumière... Pathé or the Edison Trust... Hollywood or national art cinema... film and cinema or digital and streaming.