‘Annette’ is Bound to be the Best Movie Musical of the Year!
Adam Driver | Creative Commons Image
(REVIEW) Love, glamour, crime, bananas, farting and wooden babies! Leos Carax’s newest feature film, Annette, has it all. With music and a script by pop-rock duo Ron and Russell Mael — otherwise known as the band Sparks — and a return after nearly ten years from director Leos Carax (who also collaborated on the script with the Sparks brothers), Annette is one of the most unconventional movie musicals in a while — if not ever. Better classified as a rock opera, though hard to classify at all, Carax’s newest film is both a delightful and haunting experiment in absurdist character studying by way of musical numbers — this film is a lot to unpack, so may we start?
This film has solidified the fact that nothing goes better together than Carax, a bizarre portrayal of love and that shade of green. Through and through, Annette is certainly bizarre.
Starring Adam Driver as Henry McHenry, a stand-up comedian, and Marion Cotillard as Ann Desfranoux, an opera singer, the peculiar pair fall in love with one another. The film follows their lives and the complications that begin arising after their first child, Annette, is born. It doesn’t come off as all that odd based on the premise alone. It seems like something Noah Baumbach would conjure up and frame under a realistic lens, but the moment this film starts, it becomes clear that’s not what Annette is getting to.
The opening number is by far one of my favorite scenes from anything that has come out all year. In extremely meta fashion, the cast, Sparks and Carax himself walk through the streets of L.A. singing lyrics that literally prepare you for what you’re about to watch as well as give you a taste of the humor that’s to come full throttle for the next two hours. As the song comes to a close, Driver and Cotillard depart to drive off into the start of the movie.
The best advice I can give, aside from strongly encouraging every person I can to see this film in the cinema, is to properly adjust your expectations. The only regard in which this is 2021’s La La Land is that it is an amazing movie musical.
I caught up with some of Carax’s earlier works beforehand such as The Lovers on The Bridge, which quickly became one of my favorite films of all time, and his last work Holy Motors, his magnum opus and one of the greatest films of the last decade, to prepare for his newest release. Compared to Holy Motors, this film is very easy to swallow, yet I can see why it has thrown many people off.
In a lot of ways, this is an anti-musical. Though there are a handful of songs I thoroughly enjoy, most of them are not what you would expect from an impeccably written musical. They’re not very catchy, there often isn’t a great melody, the lyrics are often ridiculous and though he sings throughout the entire film, not once does Adam Driver sound better than he did singing “Being Alive” in Marriage Story. But it isn’t that the filmmakers weren’t aware of Driver’s vocal capabilities. Every single peculiar aspect feels acutely intentional because, often, it seems this film is parodying itself and maybe even its own genre.
For example, “We Love Each Other So Much” is one of the songs (and the endlessly repeated lyric) that Driver and Cotillard sing together early on in the film. This phrase, or at least the manner it’s sung, has a silliness and a seriousness so accurately representative of love. This juxtaposition applies to much of the film: an overabundance of absurdity mixed with small doses of honest emotions. You are laughing at it while simultaneously moved by it.
Each character brings differing styles of humor. Henry McHenry’s standup is either genuinely hilarious or so unfunny it’s funny. Merely watching Driver deliver these lines is priceless. If you’ll allow yourself to accept the abnormality dripping from every scene, this film, at least for the first two acts, is a hilarious joyride. Dry, deadpan humor, ridiculously literal and growing in absurdity with every passing scene, which understandably won’t work for everyone, left me cackling. It’s the absurdity that makes the film work. Many of the throwaway jokes wouldn’t work if they weren’t made funny by the unbelievably absurd manner they’re presented in.
In terms of performances, Adam Driver’s cool carelessness that begins to turn a bit crazy is phenomenal. He has simply more room to shine than Cotillard who still gives a superbly reserved performance. Comedically, Simon Helberg steals the show as The Conductor. His solos in which he addresses the audience are hysterical.
This film is not for the faint of heart and will cause a few to leave the theater early as any Carax film is bound to do. Even after two viewings, there is still much I’m trying to make sense of, but as much as I recommend this movie, I don’t recommend approaching it with scrutiny.
“Someone says it’s so simple a kid would understand it, so bring your kid. but that’s the way I feel about my films,” Carax said. “They’re very simple. If you’re looking hard, you can get lost in my films. But kids don’t get lost.”
This film belongs in the most puzzling sections of the MoMA just as much as it does next to the Shakespearean tragedies. It is a portrait of a couple, their art and their fame that eventually evolves into a character study of a man spiraling into nothing, and, ultimately, the film is about baby Annette herself: a child exploited by people still chasing what they almost had, never to be seen as anything more than a wooden puppet to be used.
I have yet to see anything as ambitious or unique as Annette this year. Give indie theaters the support they need by seeing it this weekend. If you liked what you saw, tell a friend. If you have no friends, tell a stranger.
Score: ★★★★½ (4.5/5)
‘Annette’ is currently in select theaters and will be available for streaming on Amazon Prime Video on Aug. 20.