Annette

(Leos Carax, France/Germany/Belgium/USA/ Japan/Mexico/Switzerland, 2021)

Pierrot, le fou

Many films start in an ordinary, banal way, but in Leos Carax’s Annette there is a veritable ritual of beginning. Musicals sometimes indulge this possibility – reflexively taking sweet time to assemble the elements for the opening number – but never quite to this extent.

Over the production logo IDs, a voice – Carax’s own – mock-solemnly instructs us not to laugh, shout, fart or even breathe during the entire two hour and twenty minute running time. OK. Then there is a scratchy snippet from what the script identifies as the “first recorded human voice ever”: the French nursery rhyme “Au clair de la lune”, devoted to “mon ami Pierrot”. That Pierrot reference will later become significant.

Then, a recognisable location: the legendary recording studio The Village in Los Angeles. But even that is not given to us in an immediately legible, visible way. The image begins in darkness, with electronic static pulsating; once the musicians arrive, close shots of them plugging in their instruments flicker from obscurity to clarity, and flashing superimpositions create momentary chaos. As often in Carax’s cinema, a fiction can only emerge through an initially formless, signaletic miasma. The energy and madness of an electric age: a vision to which this director has remained true since his magnificent feature debut, Boy Meets Girl in 1984.

Finally, a prompt from the maestro at the mixing desk – Carax again (accompanied by his teenage daughter, Nastya, to whom the film is dedicated): “So, may we start?” Sparks – brothers Ron & Russell Mael with their back-up band and flank of female singers – oblige with a song titled, logically enough, “So May We Start”. But no sooner has the song kicked off than the brothers, and seemingly everyone else in the vicinity, take a determined walk together, out the door and down the street.

It is a rousing spectacle, reminiscent of the entr’acte in Carax’s previous film, the sublime Holy Motors (2012). By the end of the song, two stars – Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard – have detached from the group and metamorphosed into their fictional characters, respectively Henry McHenry and Ann Desfranoux, each off to give a public performance.

Everything that is extraordinary in Annette is already there, in embryo, before the film’s title (the design of which emblematises a moonlight motif) appears on screen at the six-minute mark.

The beguiling continuum between homely detail (the Carax family) and grand theatrics. The perfect fusion of two quite different aesthetics – that of Carax and of Sparks (who wrote the initial story) – into a co-auteur vision. The constant oscillation between the most primal, even childlike forms of storytelling (like fairy tales) and the most experimental, advanced techniques of cinema. The regal confusion signposted by Sparks in the lines: “But where’s the stage, you wonder, is it outside or within?” And, above all, the shotgun marriage of zany humour (fart jokes) with the intimation of sheer tragedy ahead.

Annette will be, as we are promised by the lyrics, “a tale of songs and fury with no taboo”, and it comes with a disturbing rider: “If you want us to kill too, we may agree”.

Both Henry and Anne, as we soon see, engage in two variations on dark, bleak art. Anne’s is the High Art form: opera, with its beautiful, cathartic vanquishings and suicides. As Henry acidly comments, Anne as an opera diva “dies and bows” every night.

He, on the other hand, is a provocateur stand-up comedian in a tradition that stretches from Lenny Bruce to Louis C.K, via the strident anti-comedy stylings of Rick Alverson’s films. Indeed, as an exploration of the performance of unfunny funniness, there is an unavoidable resonance between Annette and the rather less artful Nanette TV special by the wildly overrated Hannah Gadsby, who was briefly a mediatic sensation in 2018 (before gearing way down to a next, very ordinary, follow-up show and, later, the co-curatorial embarrassment of the It’s Pablo-matic art exhibition in 2023). This particular comparison, as we shall see, is more than apt.

Introduced like Jake La Motta preparing to enter the boxing ring in Raging Bull (1980), and eating a banana since he is billed as the Ape of God – Carax loves his animal metaphors – Henry is out to shock, unsettle and confound his audience. (There’s also here, between the stage-bravado and the animal/doll appendages, a nod to the legend of Serge Gainsbourg.) But, in an age when even controversy is a commodity lapped up by masses of adoring fans (who already seem to know most of the punchlines, mouthing their pre-scripted responses), isn’t Henry’s stage routine as predictable and unthreatening as Ann’s?

This anti-hero is compelled therefore to ever further extremes, which include a heavy dose of self-destructiveness and fatally unfocussed aggression – what the libretto calls “staring into the abyss”. (Nietzsche: “All this is interesting, to excess, but as sadness, so that one must forcibly forbid oneself to gaze too long into these abysses” – words I first read in an Edward Colless/David Kelly essay of 1983.)

Amidst glimpses of mass media frenzy (as in his episode of Tokyo! [2008], Carax offers a glacial parody of “showbizz news”) and social media mania concerning this unlikely Beauty-and-Beast union, Ann and Henry’s whirlwind romance leads to a much-publicised pregnancy. At this point, Annette introduces what I refuse to call a plot twist, since it is something that no one inside the fiction ever even comments on. Enough time has passed since initial release for me to now spoil it for you – although nothing beats experiencing this movie (as I did) completely innocent of how it will unfold.

Here’s the thing: right up to the final scene, Annette (from the moment of birth through various stages of childhood) is represented in non-human terms: as an elaborate doll/puppet. Although it caused some confusion in the unimaginative minds of some reviewers (two humans give birth to a doll, really?), this rather significant detail – which did not exist in Sparks’ original story outline – arises from the freedom that Carax proudly claims for himself as an artist. He can tell a story in any way he chooses, and use any tools at his disposal to represent and depict its deepest content.

What is this content? After the paroxysmic Romanticism that reached its peak in Les Amants du Pont-Neuf (1991), Carax’s cinema took a fully pessimistic turn. His characters became quasi-automatons, caught in hellish cycles of perpetual performance. Their allotted role in the media-spectacle is their destiny, whether they like it or not. Whether we consider them to be grand figures from mythology or tawdry types from pop culture, the end result is the same: they’re stuck in repetition. The assumed-humans are then, in this light, less than human, to begin with. And even cute little Annette – literally, little Ann – is condemned to embody two, distinct sides of her mother’s personality, the angelic and the demonic.

It would take a hefty book to weave, unweave and reweave the extremely coherent poetic universe of Carax’s films – even in its moments of extreme, deliberate zaniness. Dominic Lash’s The Cinema of Disorientation: Inviting Confusions (2020) offers a key worth exploring further: the technology of re-animation (every kind of light-filled projection and charging-up of energy); the tricky-treacherous fantasies of reliving through repetition; the states of being beyond biological life (spirits, ghosts) or at the very brink of death (there is an incredible ledger of these in Annette, including laughing/being tickled to death – which itself an elaborate knot of references to the 19th century clown-figure of “Pierrot, Killer of His Wife”); the realms of grotesque artifice and bestial, embodied instinct: all these co-exist in a tight mesh in the work of Carax – as they also do in the work of David Lynch.

Nowadays in the Carax universe, the birth of true love remains rapturous, but it is also inevitably doomed. And when Ann starts to have doubts about her man and his violent compulsions, so do we – there are reminders here of some of the greatest classic Hollywood melodramas, including Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place (1950). A startling dream-scene that expresses the onset of these complications might suggest that Carax is mocking the current situation of widespread “calling out” of potential sexual abusers. However, as Annette develops, it sincerely becomes one of the most extraordinary documents of the #MeToo era.

The film (I firmly believe) was not conceived to address this specific social movement – when Sparks elaborated it a decade previously, the main reference-point was probably the Bluebeard story, as transformed into the opera Bluebeard’s Castle by Béla Bartok in 1918, and filmed by Michael Powell in 1963 – but the contemporary atmosphere of blame and ‘reckoning’ (fear-inducing word!) seems to have interacted powerfully with Carax’s own complexes and history. He has the bravery to pursue that inner storm, as he continues to do, in another key, in the 42-minute It’s Not Me (2024) – where Baby Annette returns for an immortal finale.

Carax may not believe (as I do not believe) that all men are inherently toxic – his film detaches itself from a wash of horror-inflected thrillers on this topic including Gerald’s Game (Mike Flanagan, 2017) and You Should Have Left (David Koepp, 2020). In Annette, however, he isolates a certain kind of masculinity, embodied by Henry and so superbly conveyed by Driver, and subjects it to an excoriating critique.

Yet the drama remains, to the very end, complex, and the emotions it arouses are tearingly ambivalent – the final duet between Henry and Annette (metamorphosed into the human form of Devyn McDowell), one of the most powerful scenes Carax has ever staged, had me bawling my eyes out (“Now you have nothing to love”, indeed). A universe built on archetype and figural/cyclical repetition, after all, leaves little room for convenient ethical judgements – and even less room for the ideology of psychological-individual free will that underwrites the all-too-facile ideology of a snap, damning moral code.

Annette’s brilliant cinematographer Caroline Champetier has admitted that, when Carax first outlined the project to her in 2015, she was disconcerted by its resonance with aspects of Carax’s own life. There has always been an intimate vein in his films – sometimes cryptically so, as in the work of one of his avowed mentors, Philippe Garrel. This personal connection – and the need to somehow mirror it in the finished result – is clearly a major driving element in his creative process.

So: in 2011, Carax’s partner, actor Katya Golubeva (from whom he was separated at the time) died – and the persistent rumour that she had committed suicide found its reflection in the wrenching musical sequence (“Who Were We?”) featuring Kylie Minogue in Holy Motors. Nastya Golubeva Carax, who appears in both that film and Annette, is their daughter. The guilt – rational or not – that must linger for the surviving partner of one who suicides is a major undertone in Annette – where it is transmuted into a veritable act of murder.

And that’s not all in the backstory. Katya Golubeva’s partner before Carax was the Lithuanian director Šarūnas Bartas; Carax was a close friend of the couple during the 1990s, and acted in Bartas’ film The House (1997). The daughter of Golubeva and Bartas – Ina Marija Bartaité, who was featured in his haunting Peace to Us in Our Dreams (2015) – died in a road accident at the age of 24 in April 2021. And, in recent years, Bartas has faced multiple charges of sexual harassment and assault.

If it seems merely extraneous, irresponsible or gossipy to speculatively cast the shadow of Bartas onto Annette, let it merely be noted that the Third Party in Carax’s tale, a man who might be Annette’s biological father and is identified only as The Accompanist (played with enormous verve by Simon Helberg, bringing a virtuosic touch of Stephen Sondheim into proceedings), eventually rises to the role of orchestra conductor – and in Carax’s Pola X (1999), Bartas figured as the guru-like conductor of a modern noise-orchestra.

Beyond its undeniably dark heart, Annette is, paradoxically, the most exhilarating of films. As a musical, its level of inventiveness is astounding, with very few missteps; each sequence functions as a mini-movie in its own right (Carax’s regular editor, Nelly Quettier, works her usual magic). For the most part eschewing strict dance routines (and hence operating in the tradition of musicals by Jacques Demy, Bill Mousoulis, Alain Resnais’ Same Old Song [1998] and Christophe Honoré) but always creating movement, Carax stages the songs within a complex, often oneiric space mingling outside and within (especially a stunningly surreal theatre/forest scene) – and includes everything from a delightful sex scene to a verse from Ann on the toilet (again, predictably, stupid reviewers reacted stupidly to these scenes).

There is very little straight, unsung dialogue (Henry’s brief exchange with a babysitter stands out in this regard); more frequently, full-throated singing alternates with various modes of Sprechgesang (hence reminding us of the Brechtian-Hollywood oddity of Fritz Lang’s political musical You and Me [1938]). Everything involving artful hesitation, whispering, breaks in vocal delivery, choking and so on reaches its apotheosis in the mini-spectacle (a very Carax touch) of the nervy, ailing woman tasked with swearing in Henry at his (extremely Expressionistic) trial.

As I’ve said, Sparks is the co-auteur. As the very Annette-like cameo sequence of Sparks performing (on stage with a dancer) “I Married Myself” in the final episode of Étoile’s first TV season in 2025 reminds us, the Sparks musical idiom is unique (and, to some ears, maddening): it rests upon a grating repetition of musical and lyrical phrases that resembles the melodic churn of Michel Legrand’s scores for Demy or Barbra Streisand – but, pointedly, without Legrand’s comfortingly colourful variation and modulation.

In general, it’s astonishing how the baroque Sparks taste for finely-honed verbal cliché, Pee-wee Herman-style mock-innocence, High Culture parody and overtly metaleptic device-baring (especially in those plot-summarising lines that tell you where the story is going) manages to fit so well with Carax’s aesthetic and storytelling approach.

In relation to musical mutations, we are light years away from the smug irony of the Apple TV series Schmigadoon! (2021, followed by a 2nd season titled Schmicago! in 2023), with its endless sarcastic patter about “breaking into song” and its tendency to choreograph every number as if on a Broadway stage with the camera two inches in front of the protagonists’ noses. (This is Remediation [theoretical buzz word] Gone Wrong: film musicals only make it to TV via a flattened conception of the Proscenium Arch.) Carax and Sparks achieve something infinitely more difficult: to take us right inside, through and out to the other side of a musical’s form, address and meaning.

There are hundreds of things to say, at length; here I’ve only started to scratch the surface of a work that (like every Carax movie) I will watch and study many times over. Let’s put it in a nutshell, for now: Annette is a great film, on par in the director’s career with Les Amants du Pont-Neuf and Holy Motors.

MORE Carax: “Intimate Metamorphosis: Film and Architectural Space” (essay)

© Adrian Martin August 2021 / May 2025