Review: Leos Carax’s Annette Is a Gonzo Pop Opera About the Pull of Illusion

Leos Carax’s Annette, a rock opera that’s at once grandiose and insistently in minor key, exhibits a mix of intellectual playfulness and big, bald emotion that the director has previously attempted. Here, the results are mostly successful, though the playfulness proves to carry more impact than the big emotion. If 2012’s Holy Motors presented the maximum challenge to Denis Lavant—to bring its sketches to life as he slipped into and out of multiple characters—Annette similarly makes one to Adam Driver, who crafts a full, moving performance even in scenes where he’s just reacting to a child represented by a puppet.

Driver’s character is a rising stand-up comedian who bears the unlikely name of Henry McHenry, and whose enigmatic stage moniker, “The Ape of God,” exemplifies his tragic, hulking persona. Henry psyches himself up for shows like he’s Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull, shadow-boxing in slow motion as wisps of smoke curl up behind him. Indeed, his approach to comedy might be called pugilistic. On stage, he commands his audience to laugh while ranting in his robe and briefs, and after the show, he tells his lover, Ann (Marion Cotillard), “I killed them, I destroyed them.” Ann, a star soprano, responds that she “saved” her audience. In Annette, the odds are stacked against such opposites attracting, as Henry’s confrontational performance mode betrays a violent reaction to his own happiness that will gradually lead him off to that dark place of death and destruction, where operas so often bring us.

In a montage full of dark-hued romantic moments, Henry and Ann sing a duet, “We Love Each Other So Much,” mid-cunnilingus, and whose chorus becomes a refrain throughout the film. Ron and Russell Mael, co-founders of the legendary art-pop-rock group Sparks, wrote Annette’s script and songs, and this particular tune’s dreamy minor chords and droning repetitiveness suggest that the couple are living an illusion, in terms of both their romance and the heightened, filmic reality in which it plays out. Carax isn’t one to dissimulate the cinema-ness of his cinema anyway. Not only is Annette chockfull of impressionistic superimpositions and overt color symbolism, he also opens the film with a scene of the actors singing an overture that includes the line, “The authors are here and they’re a little vain.”

The filmmakers shake up their already unique story world by having Henry and Ann’s eventual offspring, Annette, be played by a succession of marionette-like puppets. It’s an evocation of the uncanniness of reproduction, and redolent of Charlie Kaufman’s preoccupation with puppets as metaphors for the absurdity of the human condition, though the red-headed Annette also at times recalls Chucky from Child’s Play. When Annette innocently wanders into a room as her mother bemoans Henry’s growing distance in song, the puppet’s articulated joints and dead eyes may elicit a nervous titter. Is this cute or horrifying? Eventually, we come to understand that Annette resembling a version of Pinocchio that’s been frozen mid-transmogrification may have something to do with how Henry sees his daughter.

Throughout, Carax envelops viewers in the flagrant falsity of his imagery, and each scene could be read as its own ode to the unique effects—and affects—of musical cinema. At one point, Henry and his tiny daughter end up stranded on a desert island that’s clearly a soundstage, looking up at a gauzy moon that looks like a filtered studio light. Gazing up at this light—and, later, at the false night sky projected by a novelty lamp in her bedroom—Annette instinctively begins humming a soulful tune. It’s a beautiful tribute to how light-infused images can move and inspire us, but for Henry the cynical performer it proves to be almost too much authentic emotion to bear, and a haunting reminder of his sins.

Driver throws himself into his performance as a wounded man increasingly drawn toward evil acts, but the film’s emotional heart is located more in its visual beauty and free play with artificiality than in the tragedy that unfolds. The musical format proves a natural fit for Carax’s love of the visual fantasies created by the cinema’s most basic means of illusion. His Annette may not reinvent the tragic movie romance, but it certainly casts it in a new light.