Driver, Cotillard and puppet makes three in odd musical
A film guaranteed to destroy all memories of the musical “The Prom,” director Leos Carax’s “Annette” proved a sensation at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival. This was for many reasons, one being a scene where Adam Driver’s character, a lacerating stand-up comic/performance artist, sings a song while his head is between the legs of his opera star wife, played by Marion Cotillard.
“Annette” is doggedly intent on putting you inside the mental cauldron of the Driver character, as he rails against his own fame, his perceived ugly duckling/fairy princess relationship with his wife; and the birth of their phenomenal daughter, who is played by wooden puppets of varying sizes.
Yes, the Frenchman Carax’s first film in English isn’t life-affirming so much as it is art-affirming. But it’s a weirdly compelling experience in blunt, arguably misogynist, harshly beautiful cinema.
The movie’s intentions are tipped off in the rather grand and pretty thrilling opening number, “So May We Start.”
Driver is Henry, a sour, driven artist for whom success tastes like ashes in the mouth. He wonders if he’s a changed man, at least, with the sexy highbrow diva Ann (Cotillard) in his life. But the way Carax has Ann perpetually within arm’s reach of a bright red apple — she’s both Eve and the snake, metaphorically — “Annette” casts its sleek pall early on.
Henry reacts to the birth of their daughter, and the burden of parental and marital responsibility, in ways that … well, that’s a spoiler.
It’s a blunt, even reductive narrative, essentially a contemporary chamber rock opera burrowing into a tortured psyche. For me, the movie comes alive when Carax finds the rich intersections of film and theater, musicals and opera. The main characters (Simon Helberg of “The Big Bang Theory” is the third, playing Ann’s lovelorn accompanist) are all creatures of the stage and of live performance.
Carax’s vision of Los Angeles, and of America, will strike some as hypnotic and others as snide, fame-mongering, celebrity-driven and drawn to the lonely spaces outside LA proper. Both responses are possible, too, of course. As for baby Annette? It’s no secret by now that the frankly theatrical realization of the golden child, who turns into a global superstar, takes “Annette” into full-on Bertolt Brecht alienation-effect territory. We watch Henry circle the drain of his misdeeds, and we fall in with him.
Driver and Cotillard, both excellent though it’s Driver’s show all the way, are prisoners of their self-created images, locked in a hermetic universe that nonetheless feels alive and open to just about anything visually. In the end, what? Carax may be seeking forgiveness, or at least understanding, regarding schmucky male behavior. Or maybe he’s settling for proof that Adam Driver can commit to a single, driven character like few others in modern movies. This is hardly his first time singing on screen. But here, he’s the unholy motor of a strange, singular film for singularly strange times.
MPAA rating: R (for some sexual content including some nudity, and for language) Running time: 2:20
How to watch: Aug. 20 on Amazon Prime.