140 min | R | August 6, 2021 | Amazon Studios
A stand-up comedian and an opera soprano fall in love and have a daughter who happens to be a wooden puppet. Leos Carax and the band Sparks turn the marriage into a sung-through opera about fame eating everything it touches. The puppet is the most human thing in it.
Henry McHenry is a stand-up comedian who calls his act The Ape of God. He paces the stage in a bathrobe and dares the audience to laugh. Ann Desfranoux is an opera soprano who dies on stage every night for applause. They fall in love in public and the tabloids follow them home. They have a daughter named Annette. Leos Carax and the brothers behind Sparks build a sung-through opera about two performers who feed on attention and then feed on the people closest to them.
Adam Driver plays Henry as a man who confuses cruelty with honesty. He sings live and performs the stand-up sets as acts of aggression against the crowd. The character’s charm curdles into menace and Driver never softens the turn. Marion Cotillard plays Ann with a stillness the role rarely lets her break. She dies in opera after opera and the repetition becomes the point. Simon Helberg plays The Accompanist, a conductor who loves Ann from the orchestra pit, and his long sung monologue while circling the podium is the film’s most precise piece of acting.
Carax directs his first English-language film with total control of tone. Ron and Russell Mael wrote the songs and the story, and their melodies repeat phrases until the words lose their meaning and gain menace. The boldest decision is Annette herself. For most of the film the child is a wooden marionette, jointed and blank, and Carax shoots her in soft light as if she were flesh. The opening number sends the cast marching out of a recording studio and into the streets, which announces that the film will never pretend to be anything but a staged thing. The artifice is the argument.
The film is cold by design and it wants you to feel the cold. Carax keeps the audience at the distance of the front row and refuses the warmth that a story about a marriage and a child usually delivers. That distance is the experience and also the limit. Henry’s ego swallows the movie the way it swallows his family, and the style enacts his appetite rather than judging it. The puppet asks for a tenderness the human characters have stopped earning. Annette means every cold thing it does, and it dares you to stay in your seat.