Language: English
It may have been a minute since La La Land swirled across our collective screens but the opening film of Cannes Film Festival this year, Annette, billed as a rock opera, is nothing as conventional a musical. A tempestuous love story between its leads Adam Driver and Marillene Coitard forms the backdrop for French director Leos Carax’s Annette that mixes the personal with the fantastical, and offers a unique experience that attempts to push the proverbial envelope.
Carax breaks the fourth wall by calling out on camera, “So May We Start?” with the opening scene of Annette. And the opening song “So May We Start,” extends into the initial few minutes with the actors Coitard and Driver and the crew parading the nighttime streets of LA singing the catchy number. It is Carax’s way of saying, buckle up, the ride is about to start. Carad also authoritatively instructs his audience by way of a monologue at the beginning to hold their breath. So far so good.
Driver’s Henry is a Bo-Burnham style introspective stand-up comic who appears onstage with trademark green bathrobe and house shoes. Henry has little limits that he will not cross. He derides his audience by posing his own existential questions to them, for instance — why did he become a comedian? He is a provocateur — one of his acts ends with him mooning his audience, and the other in which he confesses of having killed his wife. Which when he actually does (kills his wife, not a spoiler) results in a delightful police questioning sequence, also a song.
Coitard’s Ann, on the other hand, is a successful opera singer who seductively bites into glossy apples, when she is not singing beautiful operatic numbers or making love to Henry. They could not be more different from each other, and yet here they are smitten with each other, vrooming on bikes, and holding hands in enchanting gardens and professing their love with songs. In response to Ann’s question on how his show went, Henry replies: I killed them, referring to his audience. When Henry poses the same question to Ann, she says: I saved them.
Chalk and cheese they may be, but they marry, nevertheless. Unsurprisingly, agent provocateur soon gets bored of his marriage, right after baby Annette’s birth who strangely has the shape of a marionette. Henry grows to be unhappy; his reputation gets mired in a #MeToo case, the toxic cocktail of marital discord and masculine aggression results in irreparable tragedy. Henry, though, becomes increasingly unhinged but discovers Annette’s singing talent, and wants to exploit it with the reluctant help of Ann’s music conductor played by Simon Helberg.
Seeped in chaotic vigor, Driver seethes with righteous anger and owns the film with his charismatic presence.
He seizes control and matches up with Carax’s madcap imagination, gamely plunging headlong into the depths of Henry’s character proving to be an explosive force to reckon with. Coitard is a generous actor holding court on her own, and providing the perfect foil with her inimitable charm for Driver’s all-consuming onscreen persona, yet she disappears halfway through.
It took almost a decade for Carax to come up with Annette after his last film Holy Motors – equally experimental and wacky – but with Annette, he is back to presenting a story leaden with the sufferings of love. Annette is fantastical, and for the most part, wildly imaginative, but where it falls short is with the lack of a strong plot to hold together the performances by its leads.
That said, Annette is aesthetically brilliant with a calculated expressionistic quality to its frames, and it is hard to take your eyes off. With musical numbers ranging from the catchy to the melancholic – it is brilliant proof of the versatility of yet another wildly imaginative talent, the band Sparks, who wrote the songs in the film. Over and above the opening song, multiple sensational numbers like 'We Love Each Other So Much' and 'What’s Your Fucking Problem,' populate Annette.
Annette has its moments and those will leave you breathless. It has brilliant lighting, cinematography, and production values. With a running time of above 140 minutes, Annette can feel a tad tedious to watch despite all its desirable qualities. Besides, when it tries hard to make a deliberately twisted philosophical point about love and loss, Carax’s vision falters and gets heavy-handed, becoming a self-inflicted burden. Counterintuitive, as a song in the film suggests.
Rating: ***1/2
Annette is streaming on MUBI
This review was originally published after the film's premiere at the Cannes Film Festival 2021.
Prathap Nair is an independent culture features writer based in Germany.
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