Making a film means creating a world. Leos Carax is at the controls, the Babelsberg film orchestra tunes the instruments, the choir sings “It’s time to start”, Adam Driver gets on his motorcycle, and off we go. Take another deep breath, the director had previously advised off-screen, before you hold your breath.
Carax likes to talk about cinema itself, this fantastic, fantasmagoric universe. In “Holy Motors”, his last work nine years ago, he initially climbed through a wallpaper door into a cinema, where the oldest moving images in film history flickered across the screen.
This time he uses music to help, fulfills his old dream of a veritable music film and at the beginning lets the first 150-year-old recording of a human voice sound out very briefly. A woman sings a lullaby. What follows is more than a musical: a romantic glam rock opera with love duets, death arias, a Greek choir and a large cast. As morbid, melancholy and glowing with life as opera can be. The plot and the 40 songs come from the Sparks brothers Ron and Russell Mael.
As always with the exceptional French director, who has secured a place in the Olympics with “Die Liebenden von Pont-Neuf” and is presenting his first English-language film with “Annette”, it is about the incomprehensibility of love and the ubiquity of death. About toxic masculinity, celebrity cult, the force of reality, the magic of the arts and the violence inherent in the creative process.
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The story is simple, as is often the case with operas. Henry McHenry, the comedian (Adam Driver, last seen in “House of Gucci”) loves Ann Desfranoux, the opera diva (Marion Cotillard). The liaison of popular and serious music: it makes people laugh with murderous punchlines, it makes them cry when they die on stage every evening. The two have a child, Annette, a wooden doll with touchingly awkward gestures. Ann’s star rises in the audience’s favor, while Henry’s frustration rises when fans begin to turn away from him.
On a yacht vacation, the small family is hit by a storm – and Henry is left alone with Annette. The baby soon began to sing, became an idol for the masses and went viral – until Annette avenged her mother in front of tens of thousands at her ultimate performance in the Hyper Bowl Stadium and called Henry to account. Carax has been a father himself for several years, and he has already incorporated a father-daughter episode into “Holy Motors”. He added the father-daughter finale with an amazing metamorphosis of baby Annette to the Mael brothers’ script.
Laugh, die, kill, live on. The joke, Henry once says, is the only way to tell the truth without getting killed. Adam Driver plays the singing entertainer as an irresistible unsympathetic, self-tormenting, sullen, virile. He steps on the podium like a boxer in a green bathrobe, twists the microphone cable around his neck as if it were a gallows rope, attacks his fans and calls himself “The Ape of God”. What is the difference between us humans and monkeys? This is also a refrain in Carax’s oeuvre.
The crazy thing about “Annette”, besides the singing marionette and sung sex, is above all the virtuosity with which Carax throws off the classics and myths and transforms the genres. In spite of the severity of the guilt-and-atonement material, he plays with them lightly. There is always something childlike in its film-sacred seriousness. Alone the sometimes hilarious choirs, be it Henry’s question-and-answer couplets with the audience, the paparazzi excitement surrounding the dream couple, the midwifery choir at Annette’s birth or later the counter chants of the police and the angry mob.
Leos Carax is a masterly confusing artist
Or the incessant shaking of the fairy tale world, highly artificial backdrop and the glaring present. Here the enchanted forest house of Henry and Ann, the exquisite color dramaturgy (Henry in green and brown, Ann in red and yellow) with elegant folds and sophisticated light dramaturgy, there the kitsch and pathos of Verdi, Puccini and Co., there the Shownews, in which six women raise MeToo allegations against the comedian – or do they just do so in the soprano’s nightmare?
Carax, who received the directing award in Cannes for “Annette”, is a masterly confusing artist. He has just made fun of reconciling laughing and dying by dead tickling, only to conjure up nightmare in the next moment and to pay homage to the flickering of images in the next but one, the cinema itself. Baby Annette only ever raises his supernatural voice in the moonlight and in the shine of the stars. Or when the light from the rotating night sky lamp grazes his wooden face.
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And yet at some point there is displeasure. According to Carax, he is only too aware that most of the classic operas use the victim-perpetrator stereotype of a dying woman and a murdering man. But why does he repeat the pattern, stylize and exaggerate it in a downright self-tormenting way? Why can Marion Cotillard only be pale and beautiful, ethereal and endangered, while Henry’s character shows complexity and contradictions, including that of his rival, Simon Helberg as a conductor? Everything just so that the puppet girl can promise a better future, according to the motto, we old people can’t get out of our skin?
A child will come, a miracle from a child. It is no coincidence that “Annette” will be released in German cinemas shortly before Christmas.
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