Annette (Leos Carax, 2021)

It's difficult to fairly evaluate Annette, because there's something glorious about the fact that it even exists. It's not just that brothers Ron and Russell Mael have tried and failed to bend cinema to their will. (Although it should be said, the inability to get a Tim Burton vehicle off the ground was probably a blessing in disguise.) The idea that Sparks, a musical act as consistently quirky as they are inconsistent commercially, would have the opportunity to conceive and mount a Major Motion Picture is amazing enough. This is the kind of act of faith the corporate overlords usually reserve for gazillion-selling artists like U2 or Kanye West.

And of course, Annette is helmed by Leos Carax, a mesmerizingly bizarre auteur who, if the suits at Amazon had heard of him at all, was best known in the industry for bankrupting his producers in 1991 with The Lovers of Pont-Neuf. That colossal folly that could have permanently relegated Carax to director jail, but instead he clawed his way back with an adaptation of Melville's most despised novel, set to an original score by Scott Walker. Are we getting a sense of how insane this all is?

The project was no doubt helped along by the participation of its two stars, Marion Cotillard and Adam Driver. Then again, this casting represents another marvel, an unanticipated lightning strike against the very structure of the industry. After all, stars are "bankable" to the extent that they keep appearing in safe, audience-friendly fare. Sure, Driver can break out and appear in a small art film, like Jim Jarmusch's Paterson. That can only burnish the brand. But Annette will have a far wider reach, and Kylo Ren fans are likely to check it out and have their minds blown (and then bitch about it on the internet). This is analogous to Nicole Kidman doing Dogville or Dwayne Johnson starring in Southland Tales. It's a glitch in the matrix that teams of handlers are supposed to prevent at all costs. (If mainstream American audiences know Cotillard at all, they vaguely remember that she won an unexpected Oscar in a weak year. She's the female Jean Dujardin.)

In light of all the ways in which Annette wasn't supposed to happen, even its flaws are kind of endearing. There's nothing in this film that suggests that anyone involved was trying to play it safe. Now, ambition often means that one's reach exceeds one's grasp, and that's true of Annette as a whole. This is a movie comprised of set-pieces, made by a director who is a not-so-subtle exponent of the Cinema of Attractions. Carax's style and sensibility assumed their Platonic form in Holy Motors, a work whose very premise was its unceasing reinvention of itself, a radically new trajectory approximately every seven minutes. Annette, obviously has different aims.

One's moment-to-moment encounter with Annette is never less that involving, and is frequently captivating. It's the overall architecture that's lacking: a fantastical variation on A Star is Born, one that focuses nearly all its conceptual energy on the performer / audience dialectic. The opening number, "So May We Start" (one of Sparks' best songs in ages), not only breaks the fourth wall and addresses us as prospective spectators. It applies the visual and musical language of theater (especially post-Andrew Lloyd Webber Broadway) to simultaneously heighten artifice and display the basic limits of cinema. 

A musical conceived for film, Annette is designed to break down, and it does fairly often. With each new segment -- the childbirth scene, the stand-up routine, Ann's (Cotillard) performance of The Forest, the six women coming forward -- Carax suggests that we are observing topics and headings, knotted together in aggressively awkward ways. Henry (Driver) on his motorcycle, or Ann's limo moving through the city, occupy the place where transitions would otherwise be, but they function more like the wide-angle establishing shots Frederick Wiseman uses to connect discrete sequences in his films. (Annette wants to be an L.A. film, a project woven together with landscape, but these entr'actes are just pauses before the next bit of astonishment.)

Following the yachting accident, Annette mutates into something else, something uglier and more sinister. A great deal of attention has been given to the unusual presence of Ann and Henry's child, Baby Annette. But this decision by Carax isn't just in the interest of strangeness or Surrealism. It's a way to explore themes that could not (and should not) involve an actual child actor. For logistical reasons, few films deal directly with the problems of child abuse and exploitation, but Carax has indeed pulled off a singular feat, accurately depicting the way that an abusive parent preys on the trust they cultivate with their child in the relationship's more benign moments. 

The fact that The Accompanist (Simon Helberg) becomes a party to Annette's exploitation is crucial here, because it speaks to the conflicted (and ultimately feckless) role of non-abusers in an abusive family. Helberg's character thinks he can mitigate Annette's abuse by staying with her and Henry. Of course, part of the issue is that the Accompanist thinks Annette may be his daughter, but to my eyes that only confuses matters. He makes the mistake of believing he can keep Annette safe, when in reality he is powerless to do so, And while Annette's gradual transformation -- speaking her first words during the Super Bowl halftime show, and finally becoming flesh and blood -- coincides with her recognition that Henry is a monster, this is hardly a Pinocchio story. It is mourning and anguish that bring Annette to life, suggesting that she becomes an independent subject through trauma. 

And in a way, this could be the defining through-line driving Annette, even as it gets a bit muddy in the mix. The role of the performer is identified as one of violence. You either "kill" (Henry the comedian) or you "die" (Ann the soprano). This results in generational violence, with Annette being placed in this position before, strictly speaking, she is even alive. Carax and the Maels show us that both Ann and Henry (at least at first) are rewarded for dying / killing, but these impulses well up in the performers, determining their eventual fates.

Annette, meanwhile, is a performer without life, in the conventional sense. She does not have the capacity, or the desire, to either kill or die. Even more than puppet theater, Annette perhaps represents cinema, a creative zone that is anterior to life or death. Her exemption from these performer / audience relationships allows "her" to transcend them, becoming the viewers' primary point of identification. Like us, she is manipulated by the regrettable necessities of plot. 

And like us, she is free in the end. By aligning us with Annette and her reality-at-a-remove, Carax is able to intensify the "fake" violence of Annette, because it is indeed more real than the puppet itself. Even though this final third of Annette plays like an entirely different film., it is conceptually of a piece with everything that precedes it. It would take a director more committed to narrative coherence to completely accomplish what Annette sets out to do. Carax lacks the ability to orchestrate a rupture, and instead the film collapses on itself. But of course, this confusion has its own impact, since Annette attains life just as Annette falls apart, abandoning the story into which she was born and striking out to begin another.