Annette - 2021
There is a saying around these parts, in the Northeast, that the month of March “comes in like a lion, and goes out like a lamb.” By this, the weather folks mean that the month starts a lot more like Winter - snow, blustery winds, low temps - and (sometimes) concludes more like early Spring. What does this have to do with anything? Well, while my meteorological qualifications have never been a thing of public note, this is pretty precisely how I feel about Annette, the good-not-great new rock opera from the iconoclastic minds of Leos Carax and the Mael brothers.
Annette comes out of the corner swinging. The film opens on a dynamic number entitled “So May We Start,” which features all of its principals, film crew members, the backing band, the Mael Brothers, and even the director himself (no real surprise to anyone who has been privy to Carax substantial hubris in the past) setting the stage for our tale. If that appetizer is like an impressively dark, dour, wet March day, the first monologue from Adam Driver is an all-time blizzard.
Driver deserves his own space here. He is simply a human dynamo. This performance is so impressive, it’s almost hard to render adequately in words. The film features two long, acid-dipped monologues where Driver is performing in front of a crowd. He’s moving about, gesturing wildly, swinging mic cords, modulating his voice, and slipping effortlessly in and out of song. It’s the kind of physical performance we rarely get anymore, and it had me convinced that not only is Driver one of our best actors working, he would also be just as at home on a theatre stage. Without him, I think this production falls flat on its face.
Unfortunately for me, the rest of the crew is never this stellar. Oh, I’m not claiming that they are at all bad. Of course, Marion Cotillard is a terrific actress. I would simply argue that she is not given all that much to chew on here. Simon Helberg is an excellent side character, offering dashes of comic relief alongside more reflective serious moments. The cast was perfectly adequate.
I also won’t be one you see deriding the Sparksish-ness of the picture either. The tunes are good, the singing on point. Of course, there is that silly little thing where actors sing bits of dialogue which function as exposition to move the story forward between sequences that is a common feature of many rock operas. I do think this takes a hit, however, when the performers sometimes sing ALOUD what everyone is supposed to be thinking and concluding from the players’ interactions. This strikes me as being more than a little unsubtle. I suppose there is a reading of Carax’ intent that says this was deliberate. If so, it clearly worked less on me than others.
That may be where the rubber really meets the road, after all. It is said that expectation is everything, and I’ll admit that I was expecting much from this production. When the puppet child is introduced in the final 3rd of the film, I thought to myself - “Here we go.” I was waiting for the rule-breaking Leos to show up. The one who had naked gremlins chomping on models’ dresses, men retuning home to families of apes, limos talking to each other, and live-motion folks invested in mounting a kind of crazy insect anime porn. But alas, the film just always stayed a little better than average.
This is not to say that the puppet is a total downer, though I do find her presence a little inconsistent. If the take is that she’s a puppet because all of the adults who care for her only seek to exploit her as a toy for their liking, well, that’s just a TAD on the nose, don’t you think? Besides, that would be consistent with the behavior of Driver’s character, but her mother (Cotillard) and Helberg the conductor seem to genuinely love Annette. More than likely this is just Carax being Carax, which is to say, saying F you to all of our expectations. He made a puppet simply because he wanted one. And who cares if it’s not particularly logical in all senses, it’s still deconstructing the form. Perhaps this is the case. But the question becomes: Is this satisfying?
The finale features a pretty impressive little scene between the Ape of God himself (Driver) and Annette. I think Carax is attempting to play it as an awakening with massive emotive power. Driver at last seeing his little girl for what she really is (a fragile human in need of guidance, at the very least), and in turn, coming to a more honest assessment of himself.Yet, how could I plumb the depths of this connection when I’ve spent over two hours at a critical artistic distance from the protagonist, through Carax’ chicanery, his bucking of genre trends, and his own conceptual artifice? I’m not sure this is a fair question, but I have to ask why try to even have this scene play that way? After the more satirical bent of all that’s gone before, this strikes me a bit like attempting to have our cake and eat it too.
To conclude, the first 20-30 minutes of this picture soared so high it almost knocked me over. Regrettably, in the final third, things really came back down to Earth. Still, I’ll admit that I came to this project burdened by my clearly unfair expectations. Annette is not a bad film. It is actually quite a good one. But something about its puzzle box nature always kept me comfortably at arm’s length. Then again, perchance this is what the director intended all along.
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