Annette: Can the Musical Be New Again?
By Joshua Silva
When Leos Carax’s musical film Annette came out in 2021, it dropped in a landscape that has been consistently indifferent towards such singularly bizarre works of art as well as to its genre. Predictably, it received lukewarm reviews and little attention in America. Yet the film world failed to recognize that beyond the surface-level absurdity of the film lies a monumental revitalization of one of cinema’s essential genres.
Undeniably, the movie musical no longer holds its once-key place in film culture. From the invention of synchronized sound to the collapse of the studio system in the late 60s, the musical was a Hollywood staple, boasting greater longevity during this period than did the Western, screwball, or noir. It’s no coincidence that the first talkie, The Jazz Singer, was a musical: the studio first believed that audiences would only want to hear people talk on film if they sang.
But as New Hollywood ushered in a more naturalistic filmmaking style, the musical’s appeal quickly crumbled. Though there were still successful musicals in the 70s, they were usually either aimed at children (The Muppet Movie, The Aristocats) or were sendups of a bygone era (Grease, That’s Entertainment!). Although some New Hollywood auteurs paid homage to the genre (Bogdanovich with At Long Last Love and Scorsese with New York, New York) ,unlike the neo-noirs and revisionist westerns of the time, they were uniformly met with hostility.
Perhaps breaking into song had acquired a campiness that was out of step with Hollywood’s newfound realism, a realism which has never quite left the industry. Aside from animated Disney movies, the most acclaimed musicals of the 21st century are either jukebox musicals or overdue adaptations of broadway classics, with most being period movies.
The most memorable American film to fit none of these boxes is La La Land. Yet that film operates at a strange dissonance with contemporary life. It is a movie about two lovers whose infatuation with each other is surpassed only by their infatuation with the past. They bond over the art of the past, and Gosling’s quest to save jazz, another vital genre long past its heyday, could be a stand-in for Damien Chazelle’s attempt to renew the movie musical. But what keeps La La Land from feeling new is its devotion to the past. Chazelle scrupulously recreates the choreography and emotional beats of his favorite Hollywood musicals, but only transposes it to the present on a superficial level. For Chazelle, the present day is an obstacle to be overcome rather than the circumstance that defines his film. The present is only seen in opposition to the past; it is superficial and ephemeral while the past is sacred and enduring. Chazelle interrogates the feasibility of such a worldview, he still cannot accept the present for what it is: the only thing we ever have. This inability to reconcile past and present leaves La La Land standing in the shadow of its predecessors. It is, first and foremost, an homage. Unfortunately a genre cannot sustain itself with homages.
So then how is Leos Carax’s Annette, which wears its influences on its sleeve and positions itself in a lineage of stories tracing to Greek Mythology, more than an homage? The answer lies in this reconciliation of past and present.
This reconciliation plays out in the relationship between the two main characters, Henry (Adam Driver), a standup comedian, and Ann (Marion Cotillard), a famous soprano. Their publicized romance is complicated when Ann gives birth to Annette, a living puppet with a beautiful singing voice. As Henry’s beloved audience begins turning against him, he and Ann embark on a sea voyage. They’re caught in a storm and Henry drunkenly lets Ann drown. Following this, he and a Conductor (Simon Helberg) take Annette on tour, and her voice goes viral. But in another drunken rage, Henry kills the Conductor when he finds out that he had an affair with Ann. He’s arrested and sentenced to prison, where he is confronted by Annette — now in human form — one final time.
Before any of this happens, however, we learn about Henry and Ann through each of their performances. Carax instantly distances the audience spotlighting Henry McHenry’s rambling, tedious performance — a stand-up routine without the jokes. After removing the jokes, the performance seems off-kilter and alienating (especially combined with the audience’s mechanical laughter). But by taking these away, he unmasks the shallowness of Henry’s act — which stands in for contemporary performance. Henry’s standup is (almost literally) naked confessionalism. He bares his personality onstage and his routines center around his private life. Each one is different and has a meandering spontaneity, something that gives the illusion of“freshness” and realism. Onstage, Henry chastises Ann for doing the opposite: dying repeatedly in the same rehearsed retelling. He tells her to make her performance seem more off the cuff — seem being the key word. Henry wants his performance to seemingly reveal his genuine self, but the techniques he uses preclude all vulnerability. Henry’s standups are filled with all the common smokescreens of contemporary humor: irony, meta references, and an endless self-reflexiveness. During his performance, Henry constantly references the very act of performance: he first mocks the smoke machine on stage, ridicules the very job of making people laugh as “a disgusting, deceitful trick,” and dismisses laughter as a strictly brain to zygomatic muscle cue and response. Henry’s standup is ultimately about himself, and even when he describes his “true love,” he can’t help but be ironically self-effacing: “What I see in [Ann]... is obvious. What she sees in me… hmm… it’s a little more puzzling.”
While these techniques may appear like “honest” acts of dissolving the hierarchy between performer and audience, they actually sever any emotional connection. Both parties feel smug in their mutual acknowledgment of the orchestrated act in which they participate. Lacking emotional sacrifice, Henry’s performance is just a vehicle to feed his narcissism. He survives off of the audience’s attention, which goes hand-in-hand with his self-effacement. He confessionally sings, “I need to hear you clap, clap, clap/ Cause I’m cocky, I’m cocky, I’m cocky.”
Ann, on the other hand, performs with complete sincerity. Her performance has no improvisation, no metatextuality, and no self-awareness. Rather than tearing down her medium’s artifice, she embraces it; she lives her character. In her first shot at the opera, even though she is still backstage, her face already trembles with the fear of her character. The opera she performs, though written for the film, is presumably a pre-existing one within the film’s diegesis. In contrast to Henry’s banal confessionalism, Ann lets the voices of others speak through her — both in the case of performing another artist’s opera and Marion Cotillard literally being dubbed by opera singer Catherine Trottmann; she is a Marionnette. Counterintuitively, this lets her express her true feelings. Ann sings of a fear, one that foreshadows her coming tragedy. “...I am in danger, though I thought that I knew him, I’m wrong. I don’t know him. He is a stranger.” Within this performance, she even transcends the stage’s confines and walks into a “real” forest. She finds reality by giving into artifice.
The film does not just describe sincerity within artifice, it puts it into practice through various distancing techniques, most significantly baby Annette herself. Her being a puppet is never called attention to; she is treated just like a real baby on a literal level, though Henry metaphorically treats her like a puppet. Additionally, breaking into song itself could be seen as a distancing technique, especially when the lyrics are so conversational and repetitive. But this distancing, unlike Henry’s, brings the audience closer to sincere emotions. By singing most of the dialogue, Carax showcases the performative nature of life.
The film only calls attention to it being a musical by having an opening number, “So May We Start.” Unlike any other number, the song has a pop-song structure, a catchy melody, and an unfaltering rhyme scheme. The authors, Sparks, sing along with the cast about putting on a show. Only, the actors do not play their characters but play themselves. Only when the musical number ends can the narrative start. In this opening, Carax acknowledges the performance that actors and actresses assume during the film, and it is a cleanly-constructed acknowledgement that fits in with movie musical conventions; he then asks you to believe in the artifice that he’s created, one that collapses the distinctions between what is real and what is created. In Carax’s world, the narrative of an opera is more real than the diegetically real confessions of a celebrity comedian.
But beyond these two jobs, Henry and Ann also perform another role together: lovers. As celebrities, they perform this for the media and for crowds. And like his standup, it’s an insincere performance on Henry’s part. Ann’s performances, both as a singer and lover, sublimate themselves to tradition. She did not write the opera in which she sings “I am love,” nor did she write “We Love Each Other So Much,” but she believes in both when she performs them. Henry, conversely, speaks in his own words onstage and is outraged when he finds out that “We Love Each Other So Much” was written by the Conductor. “That was our song!” he exclaims. He claims ownership over the song, just as he does over Annette. Henry wants to own what he thinks is original (Annette’s singing or his love for Ann), but this desire for ownership precludes him from loving. In love as in art, one must sublimate their ego. Henry, being all ego, cannot love.
The differences between the way the two portrays the moment of death on stage further highlights the gap in sincerity. When Ann dies on stage, she does so with complete belief, having devoted herself to art, while Henry’s bullet-sounds-synced death is but a fake-out gag; a jump-scare that is quickly alleviated by revealing its falseness. Sound like any recent blockbuster?
Ann and Henry may embody a dichotomy between sincerity and irony, but Carax doesn’t completely condemn the latter. Carax has used irony throughout his whole career, and the film’s authors are its premiere practitioners. Carax’s main inspirational wellspring was the French New Wave, which revitalized cinema through the same postmodern techniques that Henry uses in his standup. During this era that solidified cinema’s artistic legitimacy, Carax’s hero, Jean-Luc Godard, broke the fourth wall, undercut dramatic tension with Brechtianisms, and filled his movies to the brim with inside references.
In the 60 years since, these techniques have become mainstream cinema’s crutches. Marvel movies sever their audience’s emotional attachment by following any serious moment with a joke; movies like Deadpool and Free Guy sate their audience with metatextuality, and practically every blockbuster draws its audience in with references to previous media. What was once a bold artistic choice is now a common currency deployed by studios to capitalize off of beloved media from the past.
Furthermore, Carax’s criticism of Henry’s self-reflexivity is itself a self-reflexive criticism. Though Henry’s stand up shows confessional art’s tendency towards narcissism, Annette could be read as a darkly autobiographical confession. In 2011, Carax’s wife, actress Yekaterina Golubeva, died at age 44. Her cause of death remains unknown, though there have been rumors of suicide since its occurance. Before marrying Carax, she was married to Lithuanian director Šarūnas Bartas, whom she divorced for Carax (BFI). (Carax and Golubeva’s daughter, Nastya, appears in the opening scene.) In 2017, Bartas was accused of sexual assault and harassment by two women, one of whom recalled Bartas’ particularly violent behavior (The Hollywood Reporter). With these facts, a matching image appears over the film’s three main characters with Golubeva as the dead actress, Bartas as the violent artist carrying assault allegations, and Carax as the usurper who had an affair with the actress.
But as the film progresses, these roles change, and Carax morphs further into Henry. Henry’s negligence and killing of Ann could be read as Carax’s guilt over his wife’s death, a guilt which grows as Ann’s ghost haunts Henry. This guilt physically transforms Henry. On the way to jail, he wears Carax’s signature sunglasses; by the final scene, his face is gaunt and his hair and mustache are gray, just like Carax. Its most autobiographical moment is also its most tragic. Henry, now disowned by his daughter and his beloved audience for the murder of his wife, has “no one to love.” Henry’s standup may have shut off all vulnerability, but the ending finds both the protagonist and director at their most vulnerable.
Annette may be Carax’s most autobiographical film, but it’s also the first that he himself didn’t write. In fact, Sparks completed the entire script and envisioned it for the stage before Carax became involved. The Mael brothers are referred to as “the authors,” recalling the project’s stagebound origins (Variety). In theater, unlike film, the author’s vision crucially supersedes the director’s. Annette is undoubtedly a confession, but one that, just like Ann’s confession at the opera, is sublimated to another author’s voice.
The Maels aren’t the only authors whom Carax channels. He builds his vision of the present by reaching into the rich histories of many media, the first of which is opera. The film is less of a musical than an opera on film. Scenes aren’t cleanly divided into musical numbers with a verse/chorus/verse/chorus structure; instead, the characters sing nearly all of their dialogue without any traditional verse/chorus/verse/chorus structure. This paradoxically breaks with the musical genre’s orthodoxy while embracing the tradition of its progenitor, the opera. The plot also alludes to George Bizet’s seminal opera Carmen (which Ann performed in, as seen in a poster in her house), a story that ends with a husband killing his adulterous wife out of jealousy. While Annette may be singular, its elements are far from novel.
Our director doesn’t stop there; he channels even older traditions to comment on the present: Greek theater and mythology. The low-fidelity news network that reports on all of Henry and Ann’s celebrity gossip is the film’s Greek chorus (the authors, Sparks, even sing in this chorus), and the film is replete with references to myths, namely Echo and Narcissus. Echo, like Ann, repeats the voices of others, while Henry is, well, a narcissist. The pond that generates his reflection is the audience, who feeds his self-loathing with attention. In the myth, Echo spots Narcissus while he’s hunting deer; in Ann’s opera, she sees a deer when she retreats into the woods, perhaps another premonition of the violence to come.
But even beyond that, Annette imparts its characters with humanity’s oldest symbols and motifs: the stars, the moon, fire, water. These are the most enduring elements of life, older than life itself, which makes them especially embedded in today’s society. Annette is a film about stardom — what better way to comment on that than a literal star.
The basis for channeling tradition in art may be most powerfully argued in T.S. Eliot’s 1919 essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” In it, Eliot begins by critiquing the notion of out-of-the-blue artistic originality: “We dwell with satisfaction upon the poet’s difference from his predecessors… We endeavor to find something that can be isolated in order to be enjoyed. Whereas if we approach a poet without this prejudice we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously.” Eliot specifies that this process of mediating past art is not simply one of mimicry. Conversely, “It involves, in the first place, the historical sense… a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence.” The end result of finding the past within the present is quite similar to Ann’s method of performance, “...a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.” Creating art can be a selfish act, but like, say, religious faith, it can subsume the ego into something greater than one person. In both Eliot’s and Carax’s cases, that something is Western storytelling itself.
A look into its influences reveals that Annette, like all other stories, is merely a remix of past stories and events in the authors’ lives. Annette, like Damien Chazelle’s La La Land, wears these on its sleeve. But while La La Land sees the past as an unattainable ideal, Annette takes on Faulkner’s view: that the past isn’t dead, it’s not even past. Just as Ann’s ghost haunts Henry, our past will never be done with us. The present is only the culmination of past decisions, behavior, and events rearranged. The things that make our immediate reality feel new are ephemeral, and like Henry’s audience we are quick to discard them when they no longer please us. Damien Chazelle takes this ephemera at face value, and it can be difficult not to when the most ephemeral media is often what’s usually advertised. But this ephemera is again, the same story with a new look. The solution, then, is not to aim for originality, but simply to identify the past within the present and then subsume that present into an artistic tradition — be it opera, Greek mythology, or tragedy. The importance of these stories don't fade just because of decreased popularity; Annette proves that we are still living them.
Carax, after the death of Jean-Luc Godard, said that “... it is our duty to always react and re-act, rethink everything, always reimagine everything…Our 21st century urgently needs to be reinvented” (The Film Stage). Perhaps the first step in reinventing the present is to reach into the past and (re)discover the stories that shape our reality.
Works Cited
https://www2.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/comment/obituaries/yekaterina-golubeva-1966-2011
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/lithuanian-director-sarunas-bartas-accused-sexual-misconduct-by-actress-art-director-1060179/
https://variety.com/2021/music/news/sparks-annette-interview-mael-carax-musical-amazon-1235046053/
https://thefilmstage.com/martin-scorsese-abel-ferrara-claire-denis-more-remember-jean-luc-godard/
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69400/tradition-and-the-individual-talent