'Annette': Is this magnificent, lunatic rock opera real or did you dream it?
Sea monsters, MeToo musical numbers, and a wooden baby – Leos Carax’s film was a strange and stylish start to the Cannes festival. 5/5 stars.
By Mark Olsen, Los Angeles Times, 9:45pm August 6, 2021
Directed by Leos Carax, who just picked up the best director prize when the film premiered at Cannes, “Annette” is a musical melodrama co-written by Ron and Russell Mael, better known as the band Sparks. In the film, Adam Driver and Marion Cottilard are a couple — he is a controversial comedian, she is a renowned opera singer — struggling to hold their relationship together amidst the pressures of fame and parenthood. The film goes in unexpected directions from there with a dazzling mix of audacity and emotions.
Marion Cotillard plays an acclaimed soprano Credit: Amazon Studios
For the New York Times, A.O. Scott wrote, “The fact that the characters sing more than they talk — even during sex — is in some ways the least strange thing about the movie, which casts a series of mechanical puppets in the title role. … ‘Annette’ masters its own paradoxes. It’s a highly cerebral, formally complex film about unbridled emotion. A work of art propelled by a skepticism about where art comes from and why we value it the way we do. A fantastical film that attacks some of our culture’s most cherished fantasies. Utterly unreal and completely truthful.”
Annette and Adam Driver in Annette.
For Vanity Fair, Cassie Da Costa wrote, “Annette is remarkable for its formal intensity—how every image and song is not merely reflective of, but tangled up in the ideas they give life to. Driver looms over Cotillard with his large hands splayed out like Nosferatu’s. How has this horrid man scored such a lovely woman, Henry asks himself? … Like Carax’s last ambitious project, ‘Holy Motors’ —also shot by [Caroline] Champetier and starring Carax-regular Denis Lavant as an alternately tender and monstrous actor — ‘Annette’ is interested in how both artifice and authenticity save and terrorize us. Specifically, Sparks’ screenplay explores how a man’s own confusion about what is real and what he’s made up can quickly turn from generative artistry to relentless abuse.”
For rogerebert.com, Sheila O’Malley wrote, “‘Annette’ is not just a musical, it is also a soapy melodrama incorporating elements of the supernatural (a common theme in Carax’s films). ‘Annette’ is filled with dark and sometimes self-destructive energy, where emotions are barely manageable and can only be expressed through song. This is the conceit that is so often not properly addressed in the modern movie musical. It feels artificial to start singing in the middle of a scene. It is artificial. Carax, though, is comfortable in the fluidity of the ‘real’ and the ‘assumed.’ He doesn’t worry about what is or is not artificial. This sensibility has been passed on to his talented cast, all of whom accept the conceit of the musical, and have no problem meeting its demands.”
For Artforum, Amy Taubin wrote, “With original story and music by Sparks and lyrics by Ron Mael, Russell, and LC (Leos Carax), ‘Annette’ is a full-on musical, with some 40 songs. Many are fragments, and only two are truly memorable, but that’s enough. When the actors aren’t singing, they are speaking as actors speak in musicals— with instrumentation pulsing beneath their voices and a delivery halfway between speech and song. The moments when the music drops away, leaving the actors’ voices stripped naked, are few but devastating. What makes ‘Annette’ formally complex and compelling is the marriage of Sparks’ precise but driving percussion and rhythm sections and Carax’s expansive, unpredictable, even Wagnerian onslaught of lighting and camera moves. … If the film has a flaw, it is that Driver’s performance nearly obliterates Cotillard’s, thereby reasserting a gender-defined power dynamic that Carax wants to remedy. For that to change, we must believe in the human future of Baby Annette.”
Watch the official trailer: Annette
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