Leos Carax (2021)
Good to be back at the Edinburgh Filmhouse – and typical of this well-run outfit that a warning about strobe effects appeared not as an inconspicuous notice in the foyer but on the screen, before Annette began. I was grateful for that but, after a while, was averting my eyes from more than flashing lights. Leos Carax’s new film contains numerous self-indulgent scenes that discriminating viewers may find upsetting.
The first half of Annette charts the life and death of a love affair, between Henry McHenry (Adam Driver), a notoriously provocative stand-up comedian, and Ann Defrasnoux (Marion Cotillard), an admired opera singer. The title character is their daughter, born soon after Henry and Ann marry – Annette is played by an animated wooden marionette. Her parents’ relationship founders and an attempt to mend it, on a sailing trip together, ends disastrously. One night, drunken Henry tries to force Ann to dance with him. Struggling to resist, she falls overboard. After Ann’s death, Annette mysteriously inherits her mother’s singing voice. By now, Henry’s comedy career has collapsed. He’s broke and reckons his infant-prodigy daughter could be a money-spinner. In launching her as a concert and internet performer, Henry looks for help from Ann’s former colleague (Simon Helberg) – referred to only as the Accompanist although he was also Ann’s musical director, the orchestra conductor at her recitals, and wrote music for her. The Accompanist is in two minds about Henry’s proposition. He’s against child exploitation but he was in love with Ann and wants to hear her sing again through her daughter. He joins forces with Henry and Annette quickly becomes a global superstar. When the Accompanist intimates that he may have fathered the child, Henry murders him (another drowning). Henry also decides suddenly to end Annette’s career: in her farewell performance, she declines to sing but tells the worldwide audience of millions that ‘Daddy kills people’. Henry goes to prison; a few years later, Annette visits him. In the course of doing so, she metamorphoses from a puppet into a real girl (Devyn McDowell), who rejects her father’s attempts to reconcile with her. Annette exits the cell, leaving abject Henry in the company of the discarded, now inanimate marionette.
The action mostly takes place in present-day Los Angeles. In the early scenes, Carax alternates between the two principals performing at different venues in the city. He devotes much more screen time to Henry’s comedy than to Ann’s opera-singing – an imbalance that predicts the relative size of their roles in what follows – but most of what Henry utters from the stage he sings, and his audience sings back at him (hers is hardly seen or heard). Carax, at the same time as he relegates Ann to second billing, makes clear that we’re in for quasi-opera. Annette – a ‘musical psychological drama’, according to Wikipedia – is the brainchild of the brothers Ron and Russell Mael, aka Sparks, who wrote the music and (with Carax) the screenplay. The Maels’ compositions aren’t songs exactly: they mostly consist of a few phrases repeated – musically and verbally – over and over. The ‘recitative’ is hardly in the class of Michel Legrand’s song score for The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. A couple of the Maels’ tunes are earwormy but this is meagre musical fare for a 140-minute film whose dialogue is predominantly sung.
Musical comedy or drama – on stage or screen, from grand opera to jukebox musical – is an essentially unrealistic form. Annette goes well beyond conforming to that tradition. It’s the latest addition to another, burgeoning cinematic genre: pieces whose creators take the view that, because they’re not working in a naturalistic style, their narrative needn’t make sense at all. For example, Henry’s stand-up success goes into reverse when he offends an audience but what did they expect? They know he’s a shock-tactics merchant – that’s why they pay to see and lionise him. The U-turn has to happen in order to send his fortunes into free fall. That doesn’t make it any the less arbitrary.
Plotlines and devices are used and dropped just as it suits Carax. The police grill Henry about Ann’s death at sea; there’s no follow-up to this until Annette eventually – and implicitly – accuses him of ending her mother’s life as well as the Accompanist’s (whose disappearance has seemingly gone unnoticed). Early on, Carax regularly inserts spoof TV show-business news reports on Henry and Ann – their wedding, the birth of Annette, rumours that Ann’s stellar success and Henry’s loss of popularity (shots of a ‘Sold Out’ notice outside one theatre, a ‘Cancelled’ notice outside another) are putting strains on the marriage. Yet there’s no similar report of the sensational circumstances of Ann’s demise or that Henry is being questioned in connection with it. The celeb gossip voiceover makes a brief return only when Annette becomes a star, when it sounds less excited than it should about such a phenomenon. Not only does she sing like an angel, she can fly like one, too.
One other nonsensical element deserves particular mention. When they fall in love, Ann and Henry wander through a sunlit, paradisal landscape, intoning ‘We love each other so much’. After Ann’s death, the Accompanist teaches this refrain to Annette. He reveals – to Henry’s consternation – that he wrote it for Ann, the weedy lyrics conveying his and her feelings for one another. This revelation also comes as a surprise to the film’s audience, who assumed ‘We love each other so much’ was – according to musical convention – a heightened expression of the singers’ emotions at the time. By turning it into, instead, the creation of another character, are the makers of Annette daringly subverting genre expectations or just being careless? Whichever it is, the effect is counterproductive. Henry is enraged but the viewer can now only wonder where he thought the song came from when he was singing it with Ann. (It’s not as if she launches into ‘We love each other …’ and Henry merely joins in, unaware that she’s alluding to her passion for another.)
Adam Driver is becoming a highly versatile star and, on the evidence of Annette, game for anything – which is what impresses most about his work here. Henry the stand-up dresses for the part. He wears a hooded robe over boxer shorts – in both senses of the term. His backstage warm-up suggests a fighter about to enter the ring – that’s how confrontational Henry is, and Driver’s onstage athletic contortions are quite something. So that’s Adam, what about his Eve? Ann is partial, and not just in the couple’s aforementioned Edenic surroundings, to crunching into a rosy red apple, though she never seems to get beyond the first bite. Marion Cotillard wasn’t (according to Wikipedia) the first choice for Ann. Rooney Mara was supposedly involved, then Michelle Williams. I don’t know why they left the project but if they thought the role wasn’t up to much, they were right. Cotillard is deft, charismatic and thoroughly underused (her opera voice is supplied by Catherine Trottman). Simon Helberg’s previous movie appearance was five years ago, in Florence Foster Jenkins, where he also played the leading lady’s accompanist. Helberg is somehow likeable in Annette, even though his character is a stupid concoction. His last scene goes wrong, though. When Henry starts threatening the Accompanist, shortly before drowning him, it makes no sense that, as he protests, Helberg moves towards the intimidating figure of Adam Driver.
A sequence in which Ann watches women on a television screen claiming to be victims of Henry’s sexual abuse is revealed to be a dream but it’s still possible to discern a #MeToo thread – in the circumstances of Ann’s death, in the idea of a girl child taking on the voice of a silenced mother, in Annette’s eventual metamorphosis from marionette to flesh-and-blood-girl-with-agency. When Henry takes to the stage, he’s announced as ‘the Ape of God’. (He eats bananas, to complement Ann’s apples.) After his wife has drowned, he develops an incriminating, beetroot-coloured mark on his right cheek that continues to grow. There’s no doubting Annette is another Portrait of the Artist as a Bad Man yet its prevailing artful phoniness overshadows any political message that Carax and the Maels may have had in mind. In the course of her first few years, Annette goes through nine puppet incarnations, all of them designed by Estelle Charlier and Romuald Collinet. The designs may be ingenious but the marionette child pays diminishing dividends – she’s a long-winded illustration of Henry’s treating the females in his life as ‘objects’, wanting to ‘manipulate’ them, etc. The conception doesn’t add up anyway: after all, the wooden puppet has agency enough to put her father behind bars (that’s assuming the Accompanist isn’t her father).
In the prologue to Annette, Adam Driver, Marion Cotillard, Simon Helberg, the Maels and Devyn McDowell, who won’t be seen again until a few minutes before the end, walk towards camera. Sort-of in character, sort-of as themselves, they chorus the opening number, ‘So May We Start’. This meta opening isn’t complemented by the form of the film’s closing scene, which is probably its best. It’s a relief in more ways than one when Annette grows out of her puppet form. Devyn McDowell is a strong and, in this context, a refreshingly straightforward performer whose emotions feel honest. Although this is damning with faint praise, the climactic sung exchange between Annette and Henry is more involving than any that’s gone before. The silent ending, with the camera moving unobtrusively from Henry’s stricken face to the puppet on the cell floor, is surprisingly understated (and, to that extent, effective). It should be said that Carax has the services of a brilliant cinematographer in Caroline Champetier (Of Gods and Men, Carax’s previous feature Holy Motors, The Innocents[1]), who has contrived for him many vividly arresting images. I even laughed at one: Carax cuts from the TV news about Henry and Ann’s plans to repair their marriage to their yacht, tossing in an angry sea against an ink-black sky. But Champetier’s talents serve a futile exercise.
At one point of finding Annette hard (and boring) to take, my mind went back to seeing François Ozon’s Frantz in the same cinema a few years ago – and to the woman who sat next to me but walked out before the feature got underway, so furious was she to discover (from me, in answer to her question) that Frantz was a foreign language film. I wondered then what she’d expected, given the names of the picture, its director and the main actors. I wondered now if, once bitten twice shy, she was steering clear of Annette. That title could refer to a French person, Marion Cotillard might well be playing one, and what sort of a name is Leos Carax? (An invented one: he was born Alex Dupont.) In fact, all the lyrics and nearly all the spoken words in this film are in English (there’s just a bit of French dialogue) but I hope the scandalised woman didn’t waste more than two hours of her life on Annette.
Especially in view of what Carax seems to think of those who watch screens. His voiceover at the start enjoins us, for the duration of the film to come, to keep inside whatever we may feel like expressing – his list includes, among other things, laughing, crying and farting. The instruction suggests a jocular antipathy towards the audience. There’s more of the same in the lampoon of the showbiz news reports and, less jocularly, in Henry’s fickle fans and the unthinking, worldwide worship of Annette. These things seem to matter to the man behind the camera: his musically and dramatically thin picture runs the risk of becoming primarily a condemnation of media hype and consumer appetites. Members of the press and the public who are seduced by Annette run the risk of vindicating Leos Carax.
8 September 2021
[1] The 2016 film also known as Agnus Dei.
