ANNETTE

ANNETTE

*mild spoilers*

Leos Carax' ANNETTE is remarkable. It explores its themes of love, the abyss, and the artificial nature of performance through its two lead characters, a wild, stand-up comic, Henry, and a beautiful, feted opera singer, Ann.

The artificiality of Ann's operatic emotional excess collides with the confrontational performance of Henry's stand-up comedy and smashes into a hundred colourful pieces, blending the real and the surreal to form the film's narrative. Along the way, Ann and Henry have a baby, a daughter they name Annette.

Henry is Adam Driver, all wiry musculature and existential questioning, parading his fuck-you anxiety on stage like Jake La Motta prowling around half-naked in his bathrobe, bating the people who have paid to see him. Henry challenges his audience: why they have come and why should he make them laugh?

Driver is very good in this film. It may be his best work. It's certainly his sexiest work.

Ann is Marillon Cotillard, beautiful and demure. An opera singer who, through her roles, dies every night on stage. If there is less to write about Ann, it's because one of the faults of the film is it doesn't give enough time and space to her story.

ANNETTE is very much Henry's story. Ann is there to beguile him, love him, haunt him. As such it reminded me of 1970/early 80s US cinema (from Taxi Driver to The Shining), which invariably placed a male character at the centre of a narrative and used the female characters to explore his neuroses (see Robert Philip Kolker's A Cinema Of Loneliness).

Once you get settled into the idea of it being Henry's story, ANNETTE confounds by introducing contemporary male/female issues via a #MeToo dream Ann has about her husband. The film rarely takes the route expected of it, and Carax handles the visual presentation of each scene with his customary panache, deploying a style that blurs the lines between the artificial and the real, the imagined and the experienced.

One could write about ANNETTE all day... and we haven't even talked yet about the daughter, who gives her name to the film. Towards the end, just as you feel exhausted by the narrative and its warped visual splendour, Carax gives us a father-daughter moment that consolidates the film's themes and trumps the previous scenes' shock and beauty.

A shout-out must go to Simon Helberg. Helberg is always excellent (from Big Bang Theory to Florence Foster Jenkins) and here he gives a superb performance, particularly in a one-take camera movement that circles him while he simultaneously conducts an orchestra and lays out a ton of emotional exposition.

What a time this is for Sparks. Ron and Russell Mael write the music and songs and the film with Carax, and appear in it. And those end credits where all the cast and crew appear... sublime.

Go and see ANNETTE but be prepared to hate it. It's my film of the year.