Annette: Adam Driver Shines in Leo Carax’s Arthouse Musical, But Can’t Warm an Emotionally Detached Film
By Karen Gordon
Rating: C-plus
If you want to see what it means to a film when an excellent actor fully commits to a role, look to Adam Driver’s performance in Leos Carax’s award winning musical Annette. He breathes life into what is an otherwise dry and emotionally disconnected film.
I should pause here and say that I might be an outlier: Annette opened the Cannes Film festival last month, to some breathless reviews. Carax won Best Director, and brothers Ron Mael and Russell Mael - best known as the musical duo Sparks - won the Cannes Soundtrack award for best composer. They came up with the concept and story for the movie, and are credited as screenwriters which is not surprising since most of the dialogue is sung.
Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard sing of their improbable love in Leos Carax’s Annette.
Carax is a highly respected French filmmaker, with a unique vision and a experimental bent. Annette is the follow up to his acclaimed 2012 film Holy Motors, which won a slew of awards: (The Toronto Film Critics Association gave it three, Best Foreign Language film, Best Actor and Carax was named Best Director.)
Annette is set in L.A. Driver plays a famous comedian named Henry McHenry, who is at the height of his fame with a show called The Ape of God, (Although the film doesn’t touch on this, the Ape of God is sometimes a euphemism for Satan).
Henry appears on stage though the smoky portal of an elevator, wearing a green boxer’s robe and loafers, and roams around talking in what seems like a stream of consciousness.
He’s a provocateur. The comedy we see in the bits of shows make him seem more like a shock-jock than a stand-up comedian. On stage he seems disdainful of his audience, his fans, who respond as if they were expecting something a bit more playful, more entertaining.
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His personal life appears on the surface, to be sweeter. Henry is in love with an opera singer, a rising star, named Ann (Marion Cotillard), who seems his polar opposite, both in temperament and approach to life. Where he wants to tear the audience down, she wants to lift them up.
There’s little onscreen chemistry here, which is in keeping with the tone of the film. There is emotion at first, but as the film goes on the interaction feels more clinical. When we see them together it’s hard to see a connection, and sometimes Henry seems more about aggression than romance, and too often the film uses sex scenes to imply their connection.
Where we see a more relatable or warmer view of them, is in brief news reports from an Entertainment Tonight-type TV show, where the images are of a glamorous, and fairly normal celebrity couple. The news announces their romance, their marriage and then their subsequent pregnancy.
The two have a little girl, they name Annette, who is played by a puppet, which seems fitting given how remote the movie is in emotional terms. By this point, Henry’s aggression seems to have stalled his career, while Ann’s is on the rise. To the outside world, they look like a lovely family. Inwardly things are tense. And, to add to the cliché, he’s drinking too much, and when he drinks, he gets dark.
Another key character is Ann’s longtime orchestra conductor (The Big Bang Theory’s Simon Helberg), a former lover, who still carries a torch for her, which we hear through song while he’s conducting the orchestra.
Things, of course, go wrong, and in line with Ann’s profession, the film naturally goes the way of a tragic opera.
This is an art film, and Carax, who, as mentioned earlier, leans toward the experimental, says he’s not a fan of naturalism and prefers artifice. That tone defines Annette, and so your reaction will depend on whether you find that approach intriguing. I’m in the unengaged camp.
That artifice is cemented by the sung dialogue. On screen, musicals, even ones featuring top notch singers, can seem a bit artificial. Characters move through whatever events are happening and then express their emotions by singing about it.
That’s an oddity the film has to make you buy into. In the case of Annette, none of the actors are singers, not even Cotillard who plays a singer. That adds another layer of either interest or flatness depending on your point of view.
Of course, non-singers singing can add texture. La La Land, also a love story set in the world of show business in L.A., cast non-singing leads, arguably effectively.
Carax has a vision, an eye and an energy to his filmmaking that brings a certain vitality to the film. But that doesn’t offset the problems.
For me, the film felt like an exercise, rather than a story. That may be what Carax was after here, an intent to tell a story with an unlikeable lead character in a deliberately artificial way, for whatever result or reason. Perhaps it’s brave to dive into such icy waters.
But what it’s missing is a story that feels relevant or deep. The characters are unappealing and uninteresting. Because the story stays mainly in the present and doesn’t provide much background or depth, it starts to feel more like clichés and strange melodrama: A Star is Born meets Snidely Whiplash presented like a rock opera without any hits. Can they love or not love? With the exception of Henry, the characters seem more like sketches or ideas, rather than fully realized people.
There are other elements that felt forced, including the device of cutting to entertainment TV for updates on Henry and Ann’s relationship.
At times, I felt I was watching a movie by people who had the same cultural and pop culture references as me, but whose interpretation was so different that there were few points of contact.
The film benefits from the actors who have really committed to their characters. Marion Cotillard gives Ann a warm sensuality despite her character’s role as a simple foil and sex partner. But the film really belongs to Driver who has fully committed to his character (and has all the dramatic room to move).
The pieces of Henry don’t completely add up, but Driver fearlessly plunges in to create a character we can believe. With physicality, charisma and depth, Driver is watchable, and willing to go where the character needs to go. In the end, his performance gives the film what spark it has.
Annette. Directed by Leos Carax. Written by Ron Mael and Russel Mael. Stars Adam Driver, Marion Cotillard and Simon Helberg.
Opens in theatres, August 6 and streams on Amazon Prime August 20.