Annette (2021)

directed by Leos Carax

Erin O’Brien

The act of walking out of a movie is a performance. One minute, you are watching a moving picture, the next, you are rising from your seat and heading to the door, in full view of your fellow moviegoers.

A few years ago, most people walked out of my sparsely-attended screening of Annette. By the time human Baby Annette was singing with her imprisoned father, Henry McHenry (Adam Driver, still in full Kylo Ren drag for most of the movie), my party of three were the only people left.

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Annette begins with PA announcements, as if one has entered the hallowed halls of Broadway, or the Metropolitan Opera. It asks viewers please not to fart, among other things. The show is about to begin.

The first sequence of Annette is a formal introduction by its authors: the band Sparks. Sparks have long desired to write a movie: Edgar Wright’s documentary details the brothers’ fraught collaboration with Jaques Tati. However, in Leos Carax, Ron and Russel Mael found a collaborator that understands the brothers’ whole “deal.”

Sparks are a band that relies on performance. They are two brothers: Ron and Russell Mael. Little is known about their personal lives even still. I saw them live this year—not the first time—and was stunned as always by how lively the 75-year-old Russell Mael is, jumping around the stage with glee between near-falsetto vocal runs. His older brother, Ron, stays firm at the keyboard, rising only to “do his dance.” This stiff armed gallop starts in time and gradually becomes out of sync as he becomes erratic and breathless. Then, a bow.

This schtick is decades old. In TV appearances across countries, across decades, the duo relish in opposites: Russell wearing oversized glam rock suits, Ron casting annoyed glances at his brother. Their lyrics on the surface are dirty and funny, but belie a character’s insecurity. Ron writes much of the music, and in the lyrics, the characters never get the girl, are self-effacing, catastrophe always around the corner. Then Russell sings it, stomping in time. (The song is “Pretending to be Drunk,” after all.)

Many years ago, Sparks was a band that eluded me. Growing up, all the “cool They Might Be Giants fans” (oxymoron) proselytized Sparks, showed me videos and looked at me expectantly by the glow of the computer. Do I like them? Do I “get it?” Admittedly, at the time, I did not. They are unknowable by design. “All pop music is rearranged Sparks,” claims Jack Antonoff in Edgar Wright’s The Sparks Brothers. About a decade before treading the treacherous waters of Sparks, Sparks’ layers of mystique, further obscured by their lyrics, felt like a joke I wasn’t in on. What was I missing? They elicited one question from me: “Wait, so, are they British?”

I can’t convince you to like Sparks. You just have to step into the theatrical facade.

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Our story begins in-studio and takes to the streets, with the brothers Mael ushering the uncostumed cast, in order of appearance, into the movie. The song, now incorporated into live shows, is “So May We Start?” Ever unsubtle, Sparks, tell the audience exactly what they will see—“We’ll sing and die for you, yes, in minor keys / and if you want us to kill too? / We may agree.” There’s an out-of-character amused glance from Adam Driver to Russel Mael or vice versa, one that makes the later lyric “the authors are here, and they’re a little vain” very funny. They are handed costume pieces from offscreen and together they kneel, wondering whether the stage is “outside or within?” The sequence ends with chorus girls, children, and “the authors” wishing primary characters Henry and Ann good luck and bon voyage.

It feels as if Sparks, Carax, and their characters are inviting you into the Magic Circle. The Magic Circle is a concept invoked often in games and immersive theatre—the idea that when you enter the Magic Circle, you are agreeing to the Circle’s rules. The rules of the normal world are suspended. The Magic Circle can be as simple as agreeing to the “nat 20” rule at your friend’s D&D game—a rare 20 on the die is more heavily rewarded than a dice+modifier roll that equals more than 20. It can be submitting to the magic of Sleep No More, Hecate placing a paper boat in your hand that turns to blood, before ushering you into a dark room where rain falls on your bare face.

I would like to say Annette invites you into the Magic Circle, but the fourth wall of the theatrical stage (or film screen) makes it harder to do so. But suspend the disbelief here: Annette is not governed by our rules. The baby is a marionette, and her parents are a comedian without any jokes and an opera singer famous enough to land on TMZ.

The stage is at the center of Annette—it is how Baby Annette’s parents make their living. Every night, he kills as a comedian and she dies in the opera. When Henry, on a motorcycle, greets Ann after their respective shows, Ann flips back his helmet and we see paparazzi swarm around them. He tells Ann, “I killed them. Destroyed them. Murdered them.” Over and over, Annette tells you exactly the story you’ll see—Henry will kill, Ann will die. Ann will die on a boat viewed from stage-height, when Henry forces her to waltz.

When their child, Baby Annette, is born, she is a puppet. Like, of course she is—but once we see Henry caring for Baby Annette, we realize—she will be a puppet for the entire movie: Marionette + Ann = Annette. Henry tries on the role of stay-at-home father, holding the wooden baby and observing himself, saying to no one, “This is MY baby.” A foreign object in his arms—one we won’t see physically as a living thing for two more hours.

Not long after, Baby Annette’s beautiful singing voice makes her an international phenomenon. Again, this baby is a marionette—an unsubtle visual metaphor as two adult men—Henry and the Conductor—foisting their financial futures upon the girl who represents the woman they both loved. As the stage falls away, Baby Annette’s refusal to perform at the HyperBowl sends the family to wreckage.

This is a movie that invites you into its Circle and asks you to suspend your disbelief and play by its rules. A wooden puppet brings world unity with her voice! Then it pulls a trick that astounds on first watch: Baby Annette becomes human.

When Annette visits her father in prison, Henry sings opposite a real girl. Human Annette’s voice isn’t the same voice as her preternatural arias. She’s a little girl, so she sings like a real little girl, mushing words together with tears in her eyes. Annette vows never to forgive Henry, and never to sing again. She sings “Now you have nothing to love” to the melody of Ann and Henry’s earlier love song, “We Love Each Other So Much.”

Had my audience of Annette stayed the entire time, they would have seen this final scene. This movie that feels bombastic and operatic ends so earnestly—unlike anything Russell Mael could leap around to at our show back in June. It reminds you there was a child in this story the whole time.

Henry’s final dialogue breaks the Circle, addressing… who? “Stop watching me.”

Erin Rose O’Brien (she/her) is a writer, occasional podcast host/guest, and online scoundrel. You can follow her on most places @er0b, and especially on Letterboxd, where she has the top review of Original Cast Album: Company.