Annette

ANNETTE   **1/2

Leos Carax

2021

IDEA:  A stand-up comedian experiences a drastic decline in his career while he raises a preternaturally gifted baby girl with his opera singer wife. 

BLURB:  By what metric does one evaluate such a flagrantly proud farrago as Annette? Certainly no traditional critical schema is fit to accommodate the film’s defiant unruliness, its indiscriminate blending of opera, camp, metatextuality, and emotional sincerity. There is a gentle perversity about the film’s nearly unrelenting gaucheness, how Carax and the Mael brothers seem to approach each moment with the modus operandi of affective dissonance. They walk an extreme razor’s edge between irony and earnestness, sophomoric parody and artistic meditation, with the viewer never quite sure which mode they’re experiencing. Is Carax even sure? The film careens around with an abandon that can, at times, feel stubbornly random, as if its pell-mell construction alone could serve as an alibi against formal critique. All this being said, Annette is not as outré as one might have expected from its eccentric auteurs. Essentially a macabre arthouse rendition of A Star is Born, it trades in shopworn ideas about the trials of celebrity and the artist’s process, with a particular emphasis on the psyche of the disillusioned, self-loathing male creator. These are clichés Carax and the Maels simultaneously embrace and spoof; so too their conceits about parenting anxieties, which manifest in the film’s most memorable invention, the titular, sentient wooden puppet child. The individual elements here are familiar, but in Annette’s combination of them, they become deliberately wrong, uncanny, garish. The music, symphonically rousing and self-consciously stilted in the same breath, follows suit. To the extent that anyone possibly could, Carax pulls together this shaggy experiment in the denouement, a sobering duet that denudes the cover of creative expression to reveal its whimpering human soul.