THE Puppet
ANNETTE‘S WOODEN WONDER
THE TITLE CHARACTER of Leos Carax’s offbeat musical Annette proved problematic. “Someone proposes something, which is a miracle,” says Carax. “But then, how do you do that?”
To make his “miracle”, Carax turned to an old form of magic. Annette, a little girl who ages from birth to five years old, is daughter to Marion Cotillard’s opera singer and Adam Driver’s shock comedian, and exhibits a miraculous ability to sing as beautifully as her mother while still an infant. But rather than Carax recruiting a series of child actors, she is played by a series of puppets — who give a brilliantly subtle performance compared to most kiddie stars, and are cute as a button.
All were created and performed by French puppeteers Estelle Charlier and Romuald Collinet. Yet Carax wondered if having a puppet in a film full of real-life actors would require too great a suspension of disbelief. “I don’t usually think about the future audience,” he says. “But I had to [wonder if ] anybody is going to accept this puppet.”
Charlier and Collinet were also keenly aware of the pitfalls. “Working out the right level of realism was the main challenge,” says Charlier. “Since she was to live among human actors, the puppet had to blend in. But too perfect an imitation of humanity ends up in the uncanny valley; it creates repulsion. Annette had to be instantly endearing and, therefore, realistic but not excessively so.”
With such a balance to get right, the puppeteers were concerned about their creation’s effectiveness. “Even until the [first] screening,” says Charlier, “we had doubts. Will the faces work? Will the viewer believe in this artificial being? It was very moving to see her incarnate as the filming went on, and overwhelming to discover her later on the screen.”
Annette’s design was inspired by a two-yearold Ukrainian girl called Masha that Carax once knew. Charlier and Collinet built her so her limbs and face could be swapped in and out to give her the maximum range of expressions and movement in each scene. There were months of development and rehearsal to make sure the marionette could perform the script, and then to hide her puppeteers.
That meant that, at times, there were three or four puppeteers working on Annette, endlessly rehearsing her movements to make things as easy as possible for her human co-stars. “We made sure that the actors were never in technical difficulty so that they could immediately empathise with the puppet,” explains Collinet.
What surprised them most was that the actors brought Annette to life — and vice versa.
“It was the actor’s gaze that made the puppet live,” says Charlier. “Each actor adopted Annette in their own way.”
In the end, everyone in the cast and crew seemed to fall in love with Annette — to the extent that they were horrified if they caught sight of her face being changed mid-shoot — and most of the audience warmed to the bold, creative swing as well. The director was content. “It doesn’t work for everyone, but she saved the film,” he says. Who needs a real girl when you have a miracle?