Annette

Grade: B+

Annette (a new Amazon Original – now available to stream) begins with a delicious opening speech to set the tone. “Ladies and gentlemen, we now ask for your complete attention. If you want to sing, laugh, clap, cry, yawn, boo or fart, please, do it in your head, only in your head. You are now kindly requested to keep silent and to hold your breath until the very end of the show. Breathing will not be tolerated during the show. So, please take a deep, last breath right now. Thank you.”

I had three thoughts while beginning to watch Annette. After the first 10 minutes: “This is phenomenal. This will be the best movie of the year.” In the midst of the next 10 minutes: “Is the whole movie going to be like this?” The following 10 minutes and beyond: “Yes, the whole movie will be like this.”

I can only think of one other time a film has challenged me this much: Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life. With that one and Annette, I struggle to give it a grade. Annette goes all in, and seems to be the kind of movie that wants the critic to give it either an A or an F. And indeed, it feels odd and disingenuous to rate it anything other than one of those extreme grades.

Annette is a rock opera with almost all singing. It begins as strongly as possible with a brilliant song, and some noirish cinematography as pitch-perfect as any I’ve seen, with just the right amount of quirky, eerie undertones. But then it stays there. The movie, from French director Leos Carax, plays like David Lynch cobbled together all his meandering, disjointed scenes from the cutting room floor and made a musical out of it, with mostly incomplete songs that cut in and out. There are some fearless and powerful images and moments, including many that seem to exist solely to challenge the viewer to keep watching. I had to break it up into installments.

The trio of lead performances are played effectively by the invaluable Adam Driver, Marion Cotillard, and Simon Helberg. Helberg, from The Big Bang Theory, gets to once again call upon his piano prowess that he showed so well in Florence Foster Jenkins. Driver plays a stand-up comedian, if you can call it that. So much is strange about his act. Cotillard is his wife – a successful opera singer. Yes, this movie is a rock opera, with some straight-up rock and straight-up opera. They have a daughter, which I’ll leave you to learn about if you dare. As I type this, it’s just now occurring to me that maybe there’s some symbolism in her name, Annette, and what she looks like.

This is one of the strangest movies I have ever seen. Some of the music is lovely, but it’s not an easy listen. Certainly not for a breezy day out running errands, or running a race. I thought the final number, a duet which reminded me of Confrontation from Les Miserables, was gripping and fantastically performed. The other performer more than holds their own with Driver. There’s no big button or period at the end. The movie seems to be like “well, this is as good a time as any to end” and fizzles out.

Annette began as what I thought would be a future all-time favorite of mine, only to become too much of a good thing and turn into an explosion at the Weird Factory. It doesn’t ebb, flow, or breathe like the best movies do. But I can’t deny that it contains excellent sights, sounds, performances, and individual moments, if you choose to stomach through it.

Look at me, being odd and disingenuous.

Grade: B+