When someone is currently recommending from the screen from the off in the pitch-dark cinema that it is better to hold your breath from now on, you get shocked at first. And looks around worried. You don’t have to do it out of concern for your health, as all of them have been tested here. But then you do. Because there is nothing else left to do.
Before things really get going with “Annette”, Leos Carax’s sixth film in 42 years – that is a not entirely unimportant record – that’s exactly what happens. You hold your breath. Then you see a recording studio. Chaos is there, Carax is there, the Mael brothers, who have deliberately shimmered through music history as the electronic band “Sparks” for decades, are there, Marion Cottillard, Adam Driver and Simon Hellberg and Carax’s 16-year-old daughter Nastya.
Carax says: “So may we start”. The Mael brothers start singing: “So may we start”. A rhythm starts. The whole gang breaks out on the bright, dark streets of Los Angeles. And into the night-black melodrama of an impossible love.
Now would be another chance to catch your breath. “Annette” is definitely a melodrama. A musical. A love story too. Above all, “Annette” – which is actually the job title of an opera – is a completely impossible work of art.
And like all films by the strange French monomaniac, it shoots off in all directions. A philosophical-social-gender-analytical changeling of history, a music-historical rollercoaster ride, a cinematic vaudeville werewolf who does his most graceful, wild pirouettes on the frozen surface of film history.
Esther Williams and Ophelia: Marion Cotillard in “Annette”
Source: Alamode Film
You get – pursued, jumped on, chased by allusions – when trying to find the language for “Annette” you get a metaphor gasp.
Let’s try to bring some calm into it. And tell a little about the story that “Annette” – well, also – tells. Adam Driver and Marion Cottillard, once escaped from the recording studio, transform into Henry McHenry and Ann Defranoux while they are still on the street.
He’s a comedy, in a green bathrobe, an audience member who is extremely funny. “Ape of God” is the name of his program, which is not a good sign for people who have read their Chaucer and Wyndham Lewis.
„Breathe in, breathe out, breathe in“
The monkey of God is the devil who tries to be God but only leads to a weary parody. In short. A man who laughs into the abyss until he roars into him. Or so.
Ann is an opera singer. She dies on stage every night. She does it very well (you don’t always hear Marion Cotillard singing herself).
Both are talk of the town, talk of the world. They are a public couple. They marry. They have a child (whoever has seen the birth scene or, above all, heard the song that goes with it, never gets the “Breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, push it, push it” out of their brains again, midwives should rather avoid the film) . You keep singing. That’s what you do in a musical. Singing while cunnilingus is a real milestone.
They still love each other: Marion Cotillard as Ann and Adam Driver as Henry
Source: Alamode Film
Adam Driver is darker than he was as Kylo Ren in “Star Wars”. And because that is so, of course everything goes wrong. Toxic masculinity – one can still use it once, there is no other way – is the poison from which the impossible love, from which Ann dies like the Giulietten, Adriana and Fedora, which she always lets die on stage.
Greed, envy, jealousy, murder, the whole program. The horror, the horror soon determines everything. And Annette, the child of this love, is his nemesis, his creepy doll. Adam Driver looks more and more like Leos Carax. And moves like that too. That is also getting scary.
Now one could – breathe in, breathe out, breathe in – accuse “Annette” of lagging a little behind with everything that Henry’s self, love and woman destruction has under her belt in terms of meta-stories. Musical, abuse, masculinity.
But you can only manage that if you – see the above mentioned film balance sheet by Leos Carax – ignore how Carax works, have to work, because he does not bring together the financing, for example.
“Annette” is a special case insofar as the piece has long existed as a rock opera of the “Sparks”. Already in “Holy Motors”, Carax’s last film, which was about Carax’s self-reflection, masculinity and fatherhood – there was a “Sparks” song. They liked each other.
The Mael brothers sent Carax the almost finished “Annette”. And then it took another eight years. The musical boom came. And Weinstein. And – once again – poisonous masculinity.
Carax and the Maels wrote and rejected. The story was done, the music wasn’t. It should have been 80 songs. There were 45 in the film (it goes as long as the “West Side Story”, about as many die). The soundtrack brings together twelve songs.
Rooney Mara would be Ann, Marion Cotillard would be. Nastya Carax first fell in love with Adam Driver, then infected her father. You don’t want to know how it would have turned out differently.
As it would have been different, Carax would only have had a year, but not either. Anyone who – as we have already indicated – enjoys quotes, allusions, references, metaphors, actually gets hardly any breath for two and a half hours.
Transit space between nature and culture
The Mael brothers mix up the (film) musical history. It wilts and weaves, it is singular in the texts. And yet it always sounds incredibly peculiar on a marginally depressive, melancholy foundation.
To this end, Carax constructs a bursting filmic transit space between art and life, nature and culture. Always on the edge. “Sympathy for the Abyss” is the name of one of the songs that explains everything and that you never forget.
The real stage and cinematic reality are always just one step away from each other. The alienation effects are legions. The levels of meaning jump open like advent calendar doors.
Menetekel to yourself
Carax manages to bring Esther Williams and John Everett Millais’ Ophelia together in one picture in an enchanted pool. “Annette” is a poisoned homage to old Hollywood, a requiem for great love and a memorial painted on the canvas by Carax – a single father for ten years, since Yekaterina Golubeva, Nastya’s mother, died ten years ago – to herself.
In the end they all come back and sing. And you just want to get out – full of puzzles and pictures and songs. In the air, clear your head. And the heart.
.