Annette

Annette

Once, when he was asked if his name was real or assumed, French director Leos Carax replied, “It’s a real assumed name.” This wasn’t a joke. Since he began directing at 24, he has been playing with the real and the assumed, the truth and the lie; often as not, he doesn’t recognize any difference between these ostensible opposites. Theatre is a “lie” it is about made-up worlds where people pretend to be other people but theatre is also the place where you can tell the truth. Maybe it’s the only place. The truth isn’t pretty. The truth hurts.

The truth sometimes is silly and unfair: Real life turns its back on this; theatre accepts it. So does Carax.“Annette,” his sixth feature-length film, audaciously thinks through these ideas.Most simply put, it is a rock opera in three acts (with an epilogue). Only one character speaks dialogue for any sustained period of time a man doing stand-up on stage and even then he mostly sings.

Russell Mael and Ron Mael of Sparks wrote and composed (in collaboration with Carax) what surely must be one of their greatest-ever scores for “Annette” there are so many memorable songs but even calling this movie a musical seems inadequate.It’s more like a soapy melodrama that frequently veers into supernatural territory (a common theme in Carax’s work);or perhaps better yet described as a dark night of self-destructive energy where emotions teeter on the brink of being uncontainable unless they’re sung.

Carax understands this conceit so well too many modern movie musicals do not seem to grasp how artificial it feels to start singing in the middle of scene because he gets that all along he has been living within such fluidity. He does not care what is or isn’t artificial. This spirit animates everyone in his cast, who accept the conceit of the musical and never shrink from its demands.

Adam Driver stars as Henry McHenry, a famous stand up comedian with an underground following. His ‘act’ is more of a performance art piece it’s angry, hostile, and alienating. Wearing a hooded bathrobe, Driver stalks around sometimes whipping the microphone around on its cord as his audience chants in unison. Every so often four backup singers appear in the background providing musical accompaniment and serving as a kind of Greek chorus, horrified witnesses to what unfolds before them.

In some ways Henry recalls Andrew Dice Clay; there’s also a structural resemblance (though not tonal) to what Steve Martin was doing in the 1970s when he’d come out and do his routine and then say “And now I’m going to play some banjo for you” and people would clap purely because they liked Steve Martin playing the banjo; there’s no way of knowing if it was any good or not–the persona had subsumed the person.

He has fallen in love with Ann Defrasnoux (Marion Cotillard), a world famous soprano who is particularly known for her death-scene arias. The tabloid press goes nuts over this mismatched “It Couple,” and throughout the film we get “Entertainment Tonight”-style breaks where they obsessively track their relationship; after one of her concerts he pulls up to the stage door on his motorcycle and they roar off into the night together, careening through dark tunnels until they get back to their love nest.

Their love theme, titled with Uber-obviousness “We Love Each Other So Much,” gets repeated multiple times throughout the movie, sung by various characters at different points sometimes together, sometimes separately; sometimes they’re walking hand-in-hand through fields of wildflowers; other times they’re having sex (both actors deserve medals for managing to make it appear as though they are truly touching each other in this scene). But nothing this innocent and pure can last. Henry’s comedy comes from loathing of himself, his audience and that self-loathing is real.

How could someone as beautiful as Ann love him? He’s jealous of one of her ex (Simon Helberg), a conductor who arranges all her music for her. Meanwhile she keeps having visions of Henry being taken down by a #MeToo situation (each “accuser” gets to sing her version of events on TV); she thinks she knows him. What do any of us really know about another person?

Henry does not get “canceled” because of women coming forward with accusations against him. In an act of epic self-sabotage he lights his career on fire; he cancels himself. Ann’s star rises as his falls; the tabloid press circles around them like sharks at a feeding frenzy; there are elements here of A Star is Born or New York, New York, two movie musicals where creative people try to keep their balance while one partner’s success outstrips the other’s but those are just reference points, I’m not saying Annette is derivative. They have a baby together in the middle of all this chaos and it doesn’t go well; the less said about that whole storyline the better.

Carax has, over 37 years, only made a handful of films. He began with “Boy Meets Girl” in 1984, which starred Mireille Perrier and Denis Levant (whom he would work with again and again). Two years later came the masterpiece “Mauvais Sang,” directed at the preposterously young age of 26; Juliette Binoche and Levant were back, and it remains one of the great achievements in cinema. Carax may have been 26, but he was already fully formed as an artist. His third film, the misbegotten “The Lovers on the Bridge” took three years to complete, and was such an expensive bomb France’s “Ishtar” that it would be nearly a decade before Carax made another movie (expensive flop or no, “Lovers on the Bridge” deserves to be rediscovered).

In 1999 came “Pola X,” with Catherine Deneuve, featuring a score by avant-garde singer-songwriter Scott Walker. (Music has always played a key role in Carax’s films; many of his most famous sequences are built around songs like in “Mauvais Sang,” when Levant, high on his first taste of love, runs down a dark street lined with parked cars singing along to David Bowie’s “Modern Love,” a scene Noah Baumbach lifted wholesale for Greta Gerwig’s “Frances Ha.”)

Then there was nothing until 2012’s astonishingly rich and dense “Holy Motors,” which starred Levant as some kind of shape-shifting hit man who spends the day traveling around Paris in a white stretch limo having sex and killing people. But that description doesn’t begin to convey what watching it is like it takes about five minutes before you realize you’re not going to be able to get ahead of it and how mysterious and moving and beautiful it ultimately becomes. “Holy Motors” is Carax’s most directly autobiographical movie: It is about the act of creation, about acting. The film begins with a shot of an audience sitting silently in a dark theater, waiting for the show to begin.

Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard’s passionate performances are the bedrock of this film, especially Driver’s. He moans and groans like a clumsy giant, too large and awkward for any space one tries to put him in. Love sets Henry free but love also traps him. It’s a contradiction he cannot resolve. He will have to burn it down; he can only blame himself. In Carax’s fictive worlds there is always a self-destructive streak running through them, especially when it comes to love. Love saves (like the skydiving scene in “Mauvais Sang”) but love also kills. The sweetness has an aftertaste of bitterness.

The final scene of King Vidor’s 1928 masterpiece “The Crowd” takes place in a movie theater where a massive audience is convulsed with laughter. The camera sweeps over the crowd faster and faster, pulling back farther and farther until the crowd becomes abstract, the laughter almost grotesque from this God’s-eye view.

Carax has used that scene before in his films, and it shows up here too. It has become a loaded emblem for him: one that perfectly encapsulates his concern with the artist’s relationship to their audience and with art itself as a mode of escape from or rebuke of the world; an imperfect means because people are imperfect beings. Sometimes truths are too much to bear . All you can do is laugh.

“I hope to make a film one day that will be music,” Carax told Indiewire in 2012 interview . “I wanted life in music.” So “Annette” feels like both culmination and foregone conclusion: This is where he’s been wanting to get since forever .

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