One of my favourite creative moments in any medium is the beginning of the finale of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s “Sunday in the Park with George”. George, a contemporary artist and descendent of famed pointillist Georges Seurat, speaks to the ghost of Dot, a woman that might have been his great grandmother and Georges’ lover. The two peruse over a grammar book with notes from Dot, observing the historical Georges. Words that Dot would hear Georges muttering to himself, a kind of mantra to the creative process.
As the music begins, Modern day George reads them out. Order. Design. Tension. Composition. Balance. Light. And then he falters. “I cannot read this word,” he complains. Dot interjects with the answer, “harmony.” It feels like the final, defining word of an incantation. Tying the spell of the creative process together.
The moment is a perceptive acknowledgement of creation as a process, of things coming together. And it’s a sequence I kept thinking about after watching Leos Carax’s musical drama, “Annette”. Like “Sunday in the Park with George”, Carax’s musical is – in some ways – devoted to the idea of creation, legacies and reputations. “Annette” isn’t devotedly about the creative process, although it’s also not not about the creative process. Signficantly, though, it is a work that teems with ambition, a sense of self and is odd and challenging in ways that Seurat’s pointillism may have been to his peers in the 19th century, and that Sondheim and Lapine’s creation would have been in 1984. Daring and ambitious, yes. But in the pursuit of harmony? I’m not sure how much Carax is able to accomplish on that front. Although, who’s to say that that even matters to him?
“Annette” is, at varying moments, incredibly familiar and, at others, incredibly distancing. It is a tale of love and a tale of showbusiness and a tale of surveillance. The most energetic moment is an opening sequence that is not part of its main plot. After a voice-over warning us to pay rapt attention to what follows and to curb any compulsion to, “sing, laugh, clap, cry, yawn, boo, or fart,” we follow the cast of characters preparing for their roles, walking through a street as they ask our permission to begin a rousing number, “So may we start?” As the main duo, Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard, are handed their costumes, they transform into our protagonists – Henry and Ann and they head on their way to their respective creative pursuits.
Ann is a celebrated opera singer, all class. Henry is an ambivalent comic, all crassness. While, she entertains audiences in moody operas, Henry moodily struts across the stage pushing the limits of what his adoring fans would consider humour. It’s an unlikely pair in one way, but likely in others. They are two artists at the height of their fame, paradoxical dispositions notwithstanding. The media is fascinated by their union, excited by the developing relationship and their imminent transition to parenthood. But with parenthood comes responsibilities and then jealousy. Ann’s star rises, Henry’s fall and baby Annette finds herself trapped between battling parents. A third act tragedy shifts the momentum and “Annette” becomes a bleak exploration of a man unravelling before our eyes – with the media there to capture every moment.
“Annette” has a complicated relationship with music. Most of it is sung-through with a score by Sparks (brothers Ron and Russell Mael). The band has been in the business for more than 50 years, with idiosyncratic musical stylings that waver between varying types of experimental pop music. Here, their score for the musical is agitated and self-conscious, depending on constant repetition of lines and phrases, to varying effect. The way that the singing develops is a curiosity, in parts.
But “Annette” feels way too ambivalent about its own musicality, which reflects how the film relegates Cotillard’s Anne as a seemingly supplemental part. Even as the film announces the romance as central, Ann feels like an outsider in the dynamic. Even as we spend entire sequences with Henry at his comedic shows (which feel rarely funny), our glimpses of Ann at the opera feel more illusory than illustrative.
In the love-theme for “Annette”, sung and reprised throughout the film, the pair sing of (and to) each other, ‘We love each other so much.’ There’s a lot of foreshadowing baked into this obviously. No love that is fated for good needs to be declared so relentlessly. But also, why that turn of phrase? The syntax is disorienting. Is it an observation, a declaration, or a vow? It is, as if, they are singing to some onlooker to convince. But, surely, for the romance to work we need them to show us and not tell us. Many have referred to the score from the Sparks brothers as dialogue set to music, but that feels like a fundamental misreading of what’s at work here. The declarative repetitions do not resemble spoken dialogue, but they also do not work in the way of traditional musical theatre lyrics. They rarely feel illuminated by the music. Instead, they feel to be working at cross purposes. There’s tension and composition. But where’s the balance?
Sure, part of “Annette” depends on the incongruous. The child that is born to the couple, the eponymous “Annette”, is no human child but a CGI marionette doll – treated without any hint of irony. It’s, unsettling – both for the fact but also for the vacant stare it carries – and instinctively visceral. I find close-ups of the doll seared into my memory. But to what end?
It feels instructive that the best moments in “Annette”, a musical in conceptualisation, feel punctuated by silence. Just before the start of the love-duet, there’s a menacing shot of Driver’s hands reaching to Cotillard, a misdirection but also a clue and a foreshadowing – although not quite in the way we anticipate. Other evocative moments are punctuated by the things seen and not heard – Cotillard’s face leaning out of a car window, an abandoned doll on the floor of a lonely room, a hyper-neurotic preparation for a show and – the most arresting sequence – a chaotic dance amidst torrential rain. The last sequence is the only one dependent on the music of the film. The others could be from any non-musical film. That dangerous dance, in the rain, is one of the heights of “Annette”. It’s a rare moment where the talents of Carax feel unfurled in union with the musical form, rather than alongside it or in contrast to it. For the most part, though, when Carax has to shoot a sequence where the music is centred, the camera becomes strangely less confident.
“Annette” is not a song-and-dance musical, so there is no dependence on bodies in movement, but in shooting the song sequences so tepidly Carax seems more led by the form than in control of it. There’s an inherent nonrealism to musical theatre. Singing treated as realistic requires a suspension of disbelief – and all musicals are not built the same. It is not enough to inject music into a story that would exist without music. For a musical to work, the musicality needs to be part of its very marrow. The surrealism injected in “Annette” ups the ante, so does the puppet but Driver is so stoic in his realism it pierces the conceit and so “Annette” feels disharmonious – it does not quite fit. When the actors sing, Carax’s camera follows them. For a director so prone to flights of fancy, these moments feel unusually sedate. They feel impersonal in a way that is unusual for Carax, but also deathly for a film where personality and interiority feel essential.
Musicals, I maintain, are the closest things to soliloquising one finds in the early modern plays from Shakespeare and his contemporaries. The unreality of the musical form frees characters, allowing them to sing their inner thoughts. But in “Annette”, the music never digs beneath the surface to what’s inside these characters. The characters sing what we see and what we already know, but very rarely do they sing of what they feel, or what they really want, or what they think. There’s a disconnect between us and them, and it feels too deliberate to be accidental but it’s out of sync in a way that feels more draining than encouraging.
“Annette” feels like an excellent film to prove that a film is more than its subject, or even its meaning. There’s a wealth of ideas here, even in the familiar notes of its plot. It is a film about a bad man doing bad things. Carax is fascinated and repelled by Henry, and he’s particularly fascinated with Adam Driver’s looming body – and bare chest – that the camera regards as an object of affection. But, “Annette” feels too depersonalised to really engage with much of the meaning behind the meaning until the very last number, which feels focused and teeming with a clarity that has hitherto felt absent. Or, so I think, although I wondered if I was just grateful for a musical number where the characters actually seemed to be engaging with each other – rather than in relation to each other. But, it’s only a part of a whole.
Georges Seurat was one of the earliest Neo-impressionist painters, and his technique of pointillism revolutionised art. The word described a technique where small, distinct dots would be painted in isolation but combined to form an image, so that the dots would no longer be discernible and we would be confronted with a singular whole. Isolated things put together – in harmony. There are a lot of discrete dots that fascinate in “Annette”. But the moving parts never really work together as a whole. Tension? Yes. Design? Certainly. But with so much threatening the balance, “Annette” lacks harmony. An odd thing for a musical.
“Annette” is streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
