Annette movie review & film summary (2021)

Henry is not “canceled” because of accusations from women. In a spectacular act of self-destruction, Henry torches his own career. He cancels himself. As his star falls, Ann’s star rises. The tabloid press seethes around them, salivating at the trainwreck. There are elements here of “A Star is Born,” or “New York, New York,” two movie musicals where creative people struggle to maintain their equilibrium when one partner is less successful than the other. In the midst of all this turmoil, Henry and Ann have a baby. The less said about that the better.

Carax has only made a handful of films in 37 years. He started strong, with “Boy Meets Girl” in 1984, starring Mireille Perrier and Denis Levant (whom he would work with again and again). In 1986 came the masterpiece “Mauvais Sang,” directed at the astonishingly young age of 26. “Mauvais Sang” starred Juliette Binoche and Levant, again, and it holds up as one of the great accomplishments in cinema. Carax may have been 26, but he was already fully formed as an artist. His third film, the misbegotten “The Lovers on the Bridge” took three years to complete, and was such an expensive bomb—like France’s “Ishtar“—it would be nearly ten years before Carax made another film. (Expensive flop or no, “Lovers on the Bridge” deserves to be re-discovered.) In 1999 came “Pola X,” with Catherine Deneuve, featuring a score by the avant-garde singer-songwriter Scott Walker. (Music has always played a vital role in Carax’s films and many of his most famous sequences—like in “Mauvais Sang” where Levant, thrilled at his first sensation of love, runs and cartwheels down a dark street to the accompaniment of David Bowie’s “Modern Love,” a scene Noah Baumbach lifted wholesale for “Frances Ha“). In 2012, came “Holy Motors,” starring Levant again, as a man traveling the streets of Paris in a white stretch limo, transforming himself physically for different “appointments.” “Holy Motors” is Carax’s most frankly theatrical: it is about the act of creation, about acting itself. The film starts with a shot of an audience sitting in a dark theatre, waiting silently for the show to start. 

In “Annette,” Carax admits the artificiality from the start. The film opens with musicians and singers gathering in a recording studio, as technicians tweak levers in the booth. The band begins to perform the opening number, “So May We Start,” and eventually, the number breaks its own seams when the band, the singers, the technicians, all, stand up and leave the studio, still singing as they walk through the streets, gathering people in their wake, the sound getting bigger and bigger. (This calls to mind the accordion “entracte” in “Holy Motors”). “So May We Start” acts like one of those Shakespearean opening or closing speeches, where a character addresses the audience directly about what they are about to see, or, at the end, asks for applause (like Puck’s “Give me your hands, if we be friends” at the end of Midsummer Night’s Dream.) “So May We Start” sets the terms of “Annette”‘s operating principles. It is artificial, but no less real because of it. The same is true when it comes to Carax’s stunning use of rear-projection (in one scene in particular). It’s “fake,” but there’s something about it that is more real than documentary-style reality. Nothing is fake when you’re in the act of creation.