There’s nothing more interesting in a director’s filmography than the movie they make after they accidentally hit it big, when, after years of toil and troubled labor in a specific kind of arthouse obscurity, the environment becomes surprisingly and stunningly receptive to their work. It shows you if they’re who you thought they were, or if their goals and designs are malleable enough to continue captivating popular attention. I can think of a few films in the modern era similar to Leos Carax’s Annette — Nicolas Winding Refn’s Only God Forgives, Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain, David Lynch’s Mullholland Dr. (or, if you want to get really particular about it, Inland Empire) — given how they alienated audiences following their most accessible works to that point (Drive, Requiem for a Dream, The Straight Story or Mullholland Dr.). The difference is who the film will be alienating, and I think a casual audience member will have an easier time rolling with Annette than someone churned through the gears of Holy Motors, Carax’s smash-hit return to cinema following a lengthy absence, which was an earnest ode to life and cinema that also happened to become a “dude did you see that holy shit” movie for sophomore English majors in need of something to blow smoke at on the couch beyond the staples of The Wall and the ever-present dubbed VHS of Akira that some literary-frat brother’s cousin left at Sigma and nobody ever bothered to give it back.
It’s Holy Motors‘ semi-autobiographical nature (attributed to it by critics, mainly, given Carax’s reluctance to ever speak about) that Annette seems to be, in part, a refutation of. It’s a traditional musical film — beautifully rendered in a neo-modernist Freed Unit-meets-Demy fashion — about how toxic it is for an artist to plunder their life for the material needed to sustain their creative output. On the surface, the logline reminded me a lot of Aronofsky’s original plan for the single film that cleaved and became two, The Wrestler and Black Swan, in which a wrestler would fall in love with a ballerina, their union predicated on the shared grace and brutality endemic for both types of those performers. Here, in a unified narrative, a self-effacing comedian (Adam Driver, rightfully deserving the award the Cannes Jury gave him) falls in love with an opera singer (Marion Cotillard) — the former finds protection in truth, while the other finds truth in fictional death. They marry and have a daughter, whom they name Annette, but it’s Driver whose career suffers in the aftermath of her birth. He begins to bomb at his shows, enraging his audiences, and his home life gets worse due to his drinking. It all comes to a head on the deck of their yacht during the middle of a heavy storm, where, in classic Hollywood fashion, someone falls overboard. But it’s then that Driver sees an opportunity in Annette’s golden voice, and puts himself on a potential path to run.
Pairing the style of a band like Sparks, who wrote the score and book for the musical, with a director like Carax is an ideal match: Both have a similar approach to sentiment. I’ve spent the last few months listening to the band, ever since Edgar Wright’s The Sparks Brothers played at SXSW, and my personal pet theory as to why Sparks never hit the top of the pops in the way that their most ardent fans believe they should have is because of the attribute that many love the most about their work. You can never quite tell when Ron and Russell Mael are kidding, which is an uncomfortable position for someone in need of a kind of musical catharsis to be in. The problem is that they’re always in a sort of non-Newtonian flux with regard to emotion, like how when you stir corn starch in water it has the properties of both a liquid and a solid: they mean what they say, and they also think it’s funny as hell. In a nakedly emotional genre like the musical — one founded on sincerity, despite all attempts to the contrary — it is a hell of a thing to find yourself thinking whether or not it’s appropriate to laugh or cry at any given moment, and I can imagine that uncertainty turning a lot of people off of Annette. The truth is that you can laugh at what you want and cry at what you want because this musical is built to withstand all interpretation. So, go ahead and laugh at Cotillard singing while Driver goes down on her, because… it’s meant to be funny. But it’s also meant to be romantic. And it’s also sort of sad.
Just don’t go into Annette expecting the same sort of oddity that you fell in love with Holy Motors, because you’ll most likely be disappointed — this really is a traditional musical, heightened by the cinematic flair and occasionally acrid sensibility of one of the founding fathers of the Cinema du look. It is often astonishingly beautiful in its construction, with the Yacht scene and its aftermath being one of the year’s best, a devastating meeting of sonic and visual sensibilities that aims straight for the heart. The camerawork, especially in Driver’s scenes on the stage, is restrained and elegant, and Carax has enough faith in his performers to follow Sparks’ music while finding their own ways to physically present the material. And, of course, you’ll find, beyond the general framework of the musical itself, poignant touches of the absurd, with the most obvious coming with Annette herself, represented through much of the film by a puppet, an object for her parents to manipulate and give meaning to before she’s able to assert her personhood. Credit where credit is most definitely due: if you’re making a film about exploiting your children for fame and fortune and profit, this is the way to go, as you’re ensuring that it’s not happening in the real world while you make a movie decrying it.
However, much like Holy Motors, Annette feels like the kind of film you have to watch a few times to pick up on the reasons why you like it the way you do. You emerge from the theater trying your hardest to process what you’ve just seen, with images and sounds and theories floating about in your head like schools of jellyfish, each one stinging you as you try to explain the depth of your feeling for it. You know you love it, at least, but you know you don’t want to hear anybody talk about it quite yet, especially while you still have to process it enough to write some decent words about it without managing to alienate your audience and also prepare them for when they themselves see it, the occasional uncharitable laugh from some glasses-wearing nerd among the audience (it’s always a glasses-wearing nerd with short-cropped hair and pressed pantlegs rolled up past his ankles) and to not let them follow that Pied Piper of bullshit anti-pretension all the way back to his hut, where he’ll club them to death like St. Patrick did the snakes, a form of mind-death that one might be able to come back from one day when enough time has passed and opinions have cooled off and coalesced and their takes doesn’t have as much direct social value anymore because everyone’s too busy ranting about the Barbie movie that Greta Gerwig wrote and released. Then, perhaps, they’ll sit down and see what you saw and what I see in Annette: A great and lovely masterpiece, given the breath of life by Sparks’ music, sustained by the work of its cast and crew, and made meaningful by Carax.