Even by modern-day standards, the closing
credits of Leos Carax’s Annette feel unusually prolonged, especially as the
film sticks in the mind as a relatively “small” and intimate one
(notwithstanding its splashes of grandeur), an impression cemented by the
opening (the most straightforwardly enjoyable part of the movie) in which the
two principals of Sparks, the three leads, the director and his daughter Nastya
and a few others march out of the studio and into the street while singing an
opening song. The real-life father-daughter presence seems to promise
autobiographical revelation ahead, but if so, it’s fairly depressing in nature
given what transpires, a downbeat story of a romance between Henry, a
comedian/performance artist (Adam Driver), and opera singer Ann (Marion
Cotillard) that generates a child with an ethereal singing talent, even as the
family becomes mired in tragedy and murder. The film often seems most audacious
in its withholding quality, its refusal to straightforwardly entertain (summed
up by the scene in which singing prodigy baby Annette is booked for the Super
Bowl half time show and then refuses to do anything, except to denounce her
father for his crimes). One registers one aspect after another in which the fabric
feels defiantly dour: Henry’s act is at best angry and abrasive and often
downright audience-hostile, the clips of Ann’s performances sterile by
comparison; the device of having Annette played by a puppet counts for
surprisingly little (the manipulation of Annette’s strange talent by her father
is hardly made more resonant by such a distancing device), and her replacement
by a real girl in the end only confirms the wretched isolation lying ahead for Henry).
The closing credits return to celebratory mode, the cast and crew inviting us
if we liked the film to tell a friend about it, or failing that to tell a stranger, but
the camera’s slow journey up into the beyond seems to embody the faint hope of soliciting
too many such recommendations.
