Discussing Leos Carax’s Annette with Mark Olsen of the Los Angeles Times, Ron Mael, along with brother and second half of the duo Sparks, Russell Mael, and Carax, stated that “sincerity was really primary as far as how the characters are projecting their feelings.” This might come as a shock to those who have seen Annette, which has been noted for its artificiality over and over again in reviews and features since its premiere last summer. “There isn’t a distancing of what somebody is saying from how they’re feeling,” Mael continues, finding it fortunate that he and his brother, along with Carax, were aligned on this point. Artifice and performance are crucial to Annette, though; all of our leads are performers, constantly on-stage to please an audience with stories and music and comedy. But this paradox — this clash between the artificial and the sincere — is the crux of the film, with each character torn between what performance truly means to them while existing in a world that is wholly unconcerned with adhering to realism.
Annette opens with an admission and embrace of film as an art form. During a long, continuous take — our central characters join the director, his daughter, and Sparks to sing the opening number “So May We Start.” Carax notes that before the opening number begins, the film features “Au Clair de la Lune,” the first voice recording in history, then light is projected onto the screen and we enter the first scene of the film. Our stage is a recording studio, and the players that have created this film are acknowledging the role they play as storytellers. Annette is a performance from the very beginning, and the audience is let in on this secret. These are just actors, playing parts just as much as their characters are, but once the song ends, Henry McHenry (Adam Driver) and Ann Desfranoux (Marion Cotillard) split up, heading to entirely new performances.
In the fiction of the film, Henry McHenry is a stand-up comedian reminiscent of several popular styles throughout the history of comedy. His act mirrors not typical stand-up, but the likes of anti-comedians, as Brianna Zigler points out for Paste. Though viewers drew parallels to Bo Burnham and Hannah Gadsby, even noticing the similarity of the film’s title to Gadsby’s own special Nanette, Henry can just as easily fit in amongst the likes of Andy Kaufman and Andrew Dice Clay. His style is bombast, loud, aggressive in how much it wants the audience to laugh while simultaneously being extremely unfunny. While there’s real humor to be drawn from Kaufman reading The Great Gatsby in its entirety, Henry’s act is rough to sit through — yet his audience eats it up. While Henry sings a number about making the audience laugh, forced laughter and applause follows, more evocative of a laugh-track than a live audience. Henry’s performance is a contradiction entirely: he is severely unfunny to the viewer but hilarious to the audience, selling his desperate plea to make others laugh as a joke when he is in fact quite serious in his need for the audience’s approval. Henry uses humor as an escape, a way to paint his own pain and aggression as an elaborate act. But when six women come forward with accusations against him, Carax and the Mael’s idea about the film’s proposed sincerity comes to light.
In his Las Vegas performance, Henry tells the audience that he killed Ann by tickling her feet until she died. It’s inherently absurd, and an audience would generally laugh; but, as Zigler writes, “The audience paid for a mildly offensive evening, not a fully offensive one. They feel that the bit has crossed a line and revolt against Henry,” this insincerity, combined with the accusations and amped up anger, keeping his audience at bay. All of a sudden, Henry bit involves an offensive impossibility, and this lie leaves them frightened that he might be telling the truth. But an audience this artificial, this insincere, cannot understand the difference between the truth and a performance, and they reject Henry, hurling insults until he hurls his microphone at them. The dark setup, though, as Zigler puts it, is “maybe the only truly funny bit in either of McHenry’s performances,” as he spends the rest of his acts questioning the concept of comedy with little commentary or actual jokes. After this, Henry slinks into obscurity as a comedian, drinking and abandoning his profession to focus on his family. But his shift in focus is but another performance, for he does not understand the role of “father.”
Ann, by contrast, is able to find sincerity and truth in her opera. Performing a one-woman show of her own creation, Ann sells out the theater night after night, just as Henry sells out his stand-up set. While Henry approaches his profession with anger and violence, dressing as a boxer and prepping before the show by shadowboxing, Ann dives deep into her operatic world. Where Henry’s audience is meant to be insincerity incarnate, the set design of Ann’s opera represents finding truth in her fiction. Ann is on stage, until she suddenly enters a real forest, still performing her aria. Maybe her audience simply sees the stage, but Ann, and by extension the viewer, sees a real world of magic and fear, shadow-like trees and sweeping camera movements creating a real world for her in opera.
Ann retreats to this forest, and her opera, as a way to express her truth. While Henry uses performance to pretend that his truth is a lie, Ann uses performance to express her truth through fiction. She dies every night on stage to uproarious applause of her audience, until she suddenly dies in real life, being flung from her and Henry’s ship during a vicious storm. She sings with Henry about how much they love each other, only to have that love snatched away when Henry falls victim to drinking. Ann sees the report of Henry’s accusers while in a sleepy haze, making it unclear if what she even saw was real, or if it was her anxieties about marriage and motherhood manifest into the worst thing an aggressive, masculine comedian like Henry can be: an abuser.
If Henry and Ann both use performance to hide or embrace the truth, The Accompanist (Simon Helberg) exists in a middle ground, desperately wanting to escape his truth but unable to. As Ann’s pianist for her opera, he looks on from afar, trying to accept his fate as her friend, not her lover as he once was. Music can distract him from the pain of his reality, the unending loneliness he faces as he watches Henry and Ann’s love story blossom. However, his role is minimal until Ann’s death, when the most impactful scene of the film begins.
After Ann’s death, The Accompanist has now become a conductor, contacted by Henry to discuss baby Annette and her beautiful singing voice. The Accompanist, though, introduces himself now as a conductor, the camera swirling around him as he tells of his love for Ann, how deeply he misses her, until he says “excuse me” — and suddenly the music takes over. Each and every time that he becomes more emotional and starts to reveal his true feelings, he pulls back, using the music to drown himself out as his conducting becomes more wild and tears fill his eyes. In this position, he is not a musician; rather, he controls the music, his back away from the audience as he leads the performers who, in turn, inspire him to perform through their genius. Though Henry uses performance to hide his truth, he still puts it on full display for an audience that is unreceptive to his admissions. The Accompanist, though, cannot bear the truth, and uses performance to completely hide his truth. When the words become too sincere, the feelings become too real, the mask of performance is always there, waiting to be worn.
Carax makes performance and artifice the crux of a highly sincere film at every turn. While each main character represents the different facets of performance and how it can obscure or reveal the truth, Carax uses set design to highlight insincerity. The fatal storm that kills Ann is clearly on a stage; the water that splashes onto Henry and Ann may be real, but the backdrop is obviously, well, a backdrop. News reports about Ann and Henry’s relationship feature prominent green screen effects, Driver and Cotillard clearly standing in front of fake buildings as they make no attempt to blend in with the background. Modern films use green screen far more heavily than Annette, and their attempts to look as real as possible can never quite match real life, or at the very least sets on soundstages. Annette, though, revels in the poor effects, making the celebrity coverage the film parodies look even more humorous.
Performance is not just the focus of the characters’ careers, but embedded in the fabric of the film itself — it is an opera, after all. Though there are explicit musical numbers like “So May We Start,” most lines of dialogue are sung or spoken in rhythm to music. Henry and Ann express their love through the simple-sounding “We Love Each Other So Much,” a melody they carry with them wherever they go; even in the bedroom, the two take breaks from making love to sing to the audience about their love. During the storm on their boat, Ann sings to Henry, begging him to stop drinking and come back to her and their precious Annette, and once Ann dies, she returns to Henry as a ghost with a beautiful melody, threatening Henry with her furious, ghostly presence for the rest of time. The only character that abstains from singing almost entirely is The Accompanist, never performing the opera for the audience the same way Henry and Ann do. His lack of singing combined with his tearful conducting scene make it clear that this character uses performance and music to hide; while Ann and Henry sing to reinforce their truths, The Accompanist understands that at the end of the day, this is all an act. The Accompanist’s complex relationship with music makes his increasingly large role all the richer, as he recognizes the sacrifices and pain that come with performing for the public.
After Ann’s death, Henry discovers that their child, Annette, has a beautiful singing voice. At first, he thinks the discovery is borne out of a fever dream or drunken haze, but sure enough, Annette has an operatic voice much like Ann. Knowing that finding an infant to fit the role of Annette would be impossible, Carax turned to puppetry, adding the final piece to the layers of performance embodied in his film. Annette is fake to the viewer — clearly manipulated by puppeteers and even the other actors — but to the characters, she is just as real as any other infant. Yet a puppet lies in a liminal space between authenticity and artificiality: Annette is a physical object as opposed to a computer-generated effect, but she is a simulacrum of an infant, an imitation that is not meant to trick the viewer into thinking she’s real. If Baby Annette is born into this world as a tool, an object for performance, it is the last thing she wants and the first thing Henry will force her to be.
Despite The Accompanist’s reluctance, he joins Henry as Annette’s manager, the singing puppet becoming Baby Annette and selling out concerts all over the world to fans singing “We Love Annette!” But Annette hides Henry’s secret that he is the cause of Ann’s death, and her fear of him grows by the day. Annette cannot articulate anything besides her arias, her wide eyes wincing and her head sulking as she put on display like a doll or zoo animal for the captivated populace of the world.
As Baby Annette blossoms into a superstar against her will, Henry becomes increasingly paranoid, culminating in a violent argument and murderous outburst with The Accompanist who has taught Baby Annette “We Love Each Other So Much.” The song is not an original creation to celebrate Henry and Ann’s love — Ann and The Accompanist wrote it during their week-long affair. This discovery sends Henry off the deep end, he and The Accompanist arguing outside of the former’s home until he drowns the latter in a pool, mirroring Ann’s own death. In Henry’s pursuit of fame and fortune by any means necessary, his killing of Ann is the killing of performance as truth; in killing The Accompanist, he has killed performance as a mask to hide emotions. All that remains is performance for the sake of it, for the applause and riches that come with it. The only problem? Baby Annette is a witness to these crimes.
Between murder and exploitation, abuse and anger, Henry has gone too far, and plans Baby Annette’s final performance at the “Hyperbowl” half-time show, an event in their world that will be watched by millions at home and thousands in the football stadium. Timidity takes over, though, and Annette is silent, frustrating her onlookers until she opens her mouth to speak, not sing, her first words — “Daddy kills people.” Henry is quickly taken to court, protesters condemning him for his violence against women. The love he sought from an audience fully taken from him as everyone sees that Henry’s stand-up was always more rampage than comedy. His act was never just “The Ape of God” to reference the novel of the same name, a critique of the artistic scene at the time; he was always an ape, beating his chest to assert his perceived superiority.
Henry, despite his pleas to the judge, lawyers, and even Ann’s ghost, is convicted. As Bilge Ebiri describes in Vulture, “Annette has… embraced the artificial and theatrical. With its color-coded lighting, dramatically unrealistic sets, its superimpositions and rear-projection indulgences, the whole movie has hovered on the thin line between earnest tragedy and playful, self-aware art project.” In prison, though, Annette becomes a cold, grounded film, and Annette is a real, five-year-old girl played by Devyn McDowell. Henry’s “own yearning for darkness” has destroyed everything, consuming him and spitting him out in prison. For Henry, performance was always a means to an end, a manipulation his truth contorted to become a web of lies he could market to an audience; for Annette, performance is a means of exploitation, something she could never find truth in so long as Henry controlled the narrative. They sing to each other during visiting hours in the film’s final scene, Annette rightfully taking out her rage on Henry and denying his love, if it truly is love. After all, while Carax and Sparks say that every character sings their truth, and Henry sings that he truly loves Annette, his love has always deformed into violence.
When the performance of Annette ends, the layers of artificiality are peeled away, a real girl, no longer an object for the manipulation of others, leaving Henry alone in an orange jumpsuit. Ann loved opera and found truth in fantasy; The Accompanist hid his emotions behind music and performance, terrified to live his truth; and Henry packaged the truth as lies in his stand-up performance, an act he could never keep up for long. In the end, Henry’s only audience is the viewer, and there is no artificiality to hide behind. He has no sets or costumes, no CGI or score, just a prison cell and our own eyes. Henry is able to sing his truth to the courthouse and Annette, but they no longer care; after all, even singing is an indication that this is a performance, an expression of insincerity rather than a declaration of love or regret.
The camera follows Henry as he moves to the corner of the cell, his eyes meeting the camera and begging it, and the audience, to look away. “Stop watching me,” he says, in his deep, defeated voice, again unable to keep up the performance. Henry can no longer hide behind stand-up or a stage. His dark truth is laid bare for all to see with no applause to boost his ego or encourage him to keep hiding his truth behind unfunny jokes. Annette’s realism comes not from its aesthetic choices, but every character’s inner turmoil and connection to art. In the end, Carax’s film knows that the paradox of artificiality and sincerity is not a paradox at all, but instead the life everyone leads, always ready to put on a show and obscure or heighten the truth to please the public.
I feel like this is a movie I want to see!