‘Annette’ Is Drawing Passionately Divided Responses From Audiences, Not Entirely Unlike … The Work of Andrew Lloyd Webber?

In a 2015 essay for LA Weekly, the critic Amy Nicholson quotes her former editor Steven Leigh Morris as ruling that “the difference between a play and a movie is an actor on a stage can say, ‘Hark, there lies the castle!’ and get away with pointing to a cardboard box.” She mentions this by way of calling out obnoxious laughers at retro repertory screenings, sniggering at the cruder production values in a ’60s B-movie that would go unremarked on in the theater. The boiled-down version of her point is that different artistic mediums come packaged with different sets of expectations, and that when a film dares to cross those lines in borrowing from other disciplines, the response can range from reverence to eye-rolling. She was talking about Mario Bava’s Hercules in the Haunted World, but her breakdown could easily be repurposed as a point of entry to the audacious, profane, polarizing enigma that is Annette.

The latest feature from Leos Carax has drawn the passionately divided response he always strives for, with cries of genius dissonant against charges of incoherence, turgidity, and pretension. The director used the P-word himself in a recent New York Times profile, claiming that “if you’re going to make a musical, you’ve got to be either ambitious or pretentious” and that his audience shouldn’t be left with “questions and answers, but questions and more questions and doubts.” No one can blame a person for being alienated by deliberate alienation offenses, but in some cases, there’s also a troubling refusal to recognize the more confounding moves as volitive dramatic choices informed by an unorthodox creative logic. It’s no misstep that there’s barely any comedy in the stand-up act of “comedian” Henry McHenry, or that his daughter happens to be a janky animatronic puppet. Carax asks for the willing suspension of disbelief we reserve for other forms, and in exchange, he’s gifted us with a fascinating hybrid that doesn’t limit itself to mere cinema.

With his last film Holy Motors, Carax cracked open the movie-apparatus to expose the mechanisms inside, following a man in an actor-like profession as he did makeup, got in costume, and modeled some digital motion-capture work. After nearly a decade, he’s filtering that deconstructive impulse through opera, theater, and performance art. Those artistic traditions bequeath their accented register to each piece of the film, from the bare-boned plot to the knotty, self-referential music contributed by cult-favorite duo Sparks. The sarcastic temperament in Ron and Russell Mael’s work colors this off-kilter feeling; the Greek chorus of recurring segments from goofy TMZ knockoff Show Biz News, which look like they were thrown together with iMovie, lay this much bare. In their incisive review at Reverse Shot, Juan Barquin tidily sums up the tactical fakery. “Everything in [the] film is designed to remind the audience that their characters exist within a production.” Here, the open-endedness of the word “production” gives way to the question of what kind, to which Carax offers no single reply.

The narrative contours of the film, made up of lofty signifying gestures rather than lifelike human behavior, suggest two coexistent influences by pairing shock comic “the Ape of God” Henry McHenry (Adam Driver, taking cues on hostile crowdwork from Chris Rock and Bill Burr) with world-renowned soprano Ann Desfranoux (Marion Cotillard) in a doomed romance. They’re diametrically opposed — she amuses her crowds by dying, where he ‘kills’ his by amusing them — while at the same time bonded in the directness and immediacy of onstage performance. Rather than allowing a viewer to passively observe, they engage their watchers by permeating the fourth wall, explicitly for Henry and emotionally for Ann. Carax and the Sparks brothers do the same, accosting their captive moviegoers in the opening number “So May We Start.” In loping long takes, Carax, his daughter, and the cast convene to stroll through a Los Angeles city block while announcing the nature of the evening’s entertainment in scare quotes. “So close all the doors and let’s begin the show / the exits are clearly marked, thought you should know,” goes their winking warning.

From the outset, Carax bucks convention by playing with dimensionality in a way we don’t usually see from stage adaptations, which tend to approximate the proscenium’s flatness with closed-door containment (as in Carnage, for one) or stark markers (as in Dogville). Annette‘s rousing opener moves freely out of rooms, down stairs, and through streets, framing up a tweaked vantage on our recognizable real world. For all the brushstrokes of fantasy to come, there’s a lucid connection to the current moment, made evident in the nudging of #MeToo relevance when Ann dreams of her husband getting cancelled for sexual impropriety in the later song “Six Women Have Come Forward.” But before all that, Carax deploys his prelude in the classical sense, introducing the key themes to come much in the same way as, say, the first number from Sweeney Todd.

Though that show’s creator Stephen Sondheim gets a thank-you in the credits, Carax’s techniques also call to mind the other titan of modern musical theater, Andrew Lloyd Weber. The similarities to his rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar, in particular Christ’s contentious trial before Pilate, are plentiful and striking. In terms of story, Christ’s rejection of his own celebrity once his formerly adoring public turns on him mirrors Henry’s fall from grace almost exactly. The cadence of the music befits this oppositional spirit, too, pitting Henry against his onlookers in a furious back-and-forth duet. (The chanted shouts of “Why did you become a comedian, Henry?” sound just like the Romans’ jeering refrain of “We have no king but Caesar!”) Above all else, the two works share an atmosphere of conspicuous magnificence, under which every larger-than-life scene towers with gravitas.

Opera’s inherent momentousness can create a disorienting clash when coupled with more mortally-scaled material, a frequent occurrence in a film addressing the pitfalls of 21st-century fame. Much has been made about the ballad “We Love Each Other So Much,” which finds Henry and Ann serenading each other while in shifting sexual congress. With the novelty of a first viewing, the sight of Driver’s face coming up from between Cotillard’s legs to sing a few bars strafes the absurd. Upon a heartily recommended second viewing, however, the seemingly unavoidable humor fades away, replaced by a trembling sincerity. Likewise with baby Annette herself, whose puppet state goes from off-putting to moving once her father starts exploiting and capitalizing on her ability to sing, implicitly working her strings. This delicate negotiation between the tone and subject matter reminded me of John Adams’ Nixon in China, in which Mao and Tricky Dick belt the high notes as they establish national mythologies. New York Times music critic Donal Henahan had a hard time taking it all seriously, dismissing the landmark opera as “fluff” and “worth a few giggles[.]”

Everything in the dense, beguiling Annette makes more sense within the context of opera, in particular the meandering, toe-tapper-free soundtrack from Sparks that’s rubbed some the wrong way. Yet just as the Maels have maintained an active career for five decades on the devotion of their small, dedicated cult fanbase, Carax’s film has found partisans attuned to its strange brew of styles and modes. A familiarity with various art forms’ unique properties helps along appreciation, but all that’s really required is an open mind about how movies ought to work. In any case, the seams are meant to show. Carax calls attention to the nonreal, and invites us to follow where it might lead us. The reward for our good faith is a film unlike any that’s come before, for which the label “film” is almost insufficient. It’s a new, mutant breed of moving picture, challenging its audience to evolve along with it.

Charles Bramesco (@intothecrevassse) is a film and television critic living in Brooklyn. In addition to Decider, his work has also appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Newsweek, Nylon, Vulture, The A.V. Club, Vox, and plenty of other semi-reputable publications. His favorite film is Boogie Nights.

Watch Annette on Amazon Prime Video