Annette

Annette
Starring Adam Driver, Marion Cotillard, Simon Helberg, Devyn McDowell
Directed by Leos Carax

I can fully appreciate a decent avant-garde film (films that allow the viewers to question and challenge their thinking about what they see in the aspects of time, space, dreams, fantasy, and perception) when it's done right. Films like "Eraserhead," "Mulholland Dr.," and "Enter the Void" are exceptional pieces of unique cinema that were revolutionary, groundbreaking, and downright unnerving to the very core of one's existence. Then there's films that try to be avant-garde by manipulating the audience and showing itself as something purely hollow - beautiful to look at, but when you dig deeper you find nothing worth of substance. That's what "Annette" was - a wannabe avant-garde film that's bloated, filled with mindless musical numbers, and offers a very linear story that's delivered with beautiful visuals and tremendous, dedicated performances. 

Edgy comedian Henry McHenry (Adam Driver) makes a living being a stand-up comic, but his shtick isn't really funny, but downright angry and condescending. He praddles on about not wanting to be a celebrity and doing the comedy just so he can disarm the audience in order to tell his truth, and his gig is more easily defined as a performance art piece rather than pure stand-up. He's jaded and bitter, but somehow he managed to find love with famed soprano Ann Defrasnoux (Marion Cotillard), who's known for her death arias that Henry insults in his act. The two mismatched celebrities somehow fell in love, got married, and gave birth to their daughter Annette, who's a wooden marionette puppet. As Ann's celebrity continues to rise, Henry's falls until he has a meltdown on stage that effectively ends his career, as he focuses more time on Annette and spiraling downward into a world of alcoholism that threatens everyone's lives.

"Annette" is very hard to describe yet also incredibly easy to summarize: odd celebrity couple falls in love, has child, uses child for their own gains, experience the ups and downs of life, and then the movie ends. Pure, simple, easy, concise. Yet the path it took to get from A to B weaves in extraordinarily bland ways for such a unique film concept, it's almost a travesty that something so special could end up so boring and pointless.

The basis for "Annette" stems from a band called Sparks, who planned for it to be a part of their musical tour, but after meeting director Leos Carax, they decided to transfer it to the big screen instead. The film is pretty much an extended music video, and while I'm a huge fan of musicals, it has to be done right and provide the most amazing songs possible ("The Greatest Showman" is a prime example of a spectacular modern musical, as I still have the soundtrack playing on my iTunes). Here, however, the songs all tend to blend together with the same cadence and tone, and the lyrics are incredibly uninspiring, as the majority of the time the song is just repetition of the same line, which is effective in the fact that it sticks in your head because the easiest way to remember something is constantly repeating it, but these aren't songs you want in your head, and you'd rather bash your skull against a concrete wall in order to forget them, even if it leads to long-term memory loss - it's a fair trade.

Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard deliver performances that far exceed the ramifications of such an imperfect film (especially considering the fact that Driver sang his own songs, and his singing voice would definitely not earn acclaim from Simon Cowell. Driver especially nails his role as douchebag Henry, who is wholly unlikable and offers no redeeming qualities about himself as he self-implodes under the weight of Ann's success. Cotillard plays Ann as the total opposite - a nice, sweet, kind person who you never would've guessed would've fallen for a man like Henry, but she also harbors deep-seeded ill-will for her husband, which shows in the concept of Annette, which is really the most frightening thing of the entire film., When Annette is "born," she's a wooden marionette puppet that makes Chucky from "Child's Play" look about as innocent as a Ken doll. While it doesn't make sense at the beginning, it actually slowly unravels the importance of Carax making her a marionette as the film progresses, which is a small stroke of genius on his part. Annette is being used by each of her parents for different means - Henry to rekindle his fame, and Ann to get revenge on Henry for the wrongs he's committed - and neither one really shows any true love for the little..."girl."

Apart from their performances and the allegory of using a little girl for a parental dispute, the other positive thing that "Annette" has going for it is its visual style and set designs, which are really hard to explain without watching it, but to sit through an almost two-and-a-half hour drudgefest just to admire the background is like traveling all the way to Paris to admire the Louvre and then immediately fly back home. Not worth it on its own. As I said before, the songs are excruciatingly bad and the choreography is worse, and there's a pretentiousness that oozes through pretty much every scene, serving almost as a proverbial hammer to hit over the heads of the audience while exclaiming "I am avant-garde!" A block of cheese can exclaim it's a pillow, but I wouldn't want to sleep on that.

Despite rousing performances by Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard, "Annette" is simply an overly-long, pretentious wannabe avant-garde film that's filled to the brim with uninspired musical numbers that will unfortunately get stuck in your head due to their repetitiveness.

The Score: D+