ANNETTE and the Uncanny Art of Ugly Artifice (Patreon)

For whatever it’s worth (and favoritism is worth very little) Leos Carax is probably one of my favorite filmmakers. I feel like most people know him from the fairly-recent tour de force that is Holy Motors, a vignette-laden fever dream about performative selves, the deep well of grief, and losing yourself in art. But he’s honestly been doing some of the most brazen cinema in this fashion for a long, long time now, often with frequent actor / collaborator Denis Levant. To wit, his segment in the anthology film Tokyo! (along with two other little filmmakers named Michel Gondry and Bong Joon Ho) was actually a forerunner to Holy Motors’ use of the “Merde” character - which Carax said was an abstract representation of what it feels like to be French in a polite country. But his work is not limited to uncontrollable swearing and hand grenades, there’s the greek-myth-level of familial sexual dysfunction in Pola X, the cascading emotional and literal fireworks of the homeless love story in Lover On The Bridge (which actually recreated downtown Paris in the countryside and is thus one of the most expensive french films ever made), the lurid, complex introspection of his first feature Boy Meets Girl. And perhaps nothing captures the juxtaposition between Carax’s theatrical elation and sadness quite like this famous running sequence from Mauvas Sang (if you’ve never seen it, stick with the set-up until the music drops halfway through). So when I think about Carax, I think about the almost singular nature of his artistic approach. For it’s his ability to use clear artifice to provoke, to create a visceral sense of mood, which then create explosions of emotion, while still operating within coherent thematic symbolism.

Which is actually part of what makes Annette so damn funny.

At least aesthetically speaking. But the problem is that aesthetics are one of the hardest things to talk about in the world. Because you have innate opinions on what looks good and what looks bad. They are immediate and obvious to you, almost like a spinal cord reaction. And like automated responses, they are so hard to justify and explain. Especially when they can add up in a way that feels so wildly divergent from others. Because there’s people who like the look of a sleek modern penthouse, or those who like the innate carving work on an antique piece of furniture, or then there’s the litany of Italian American households who had kitchens like in The Sopranos. We all have different aesthetic preferences. And they are based on experience.

This also has a weird amount to do with what’s funny to us. Not just because laughter is also an automated response, but because it mines a specific set of reference points in our head and adds up to a clear viewpoint. Like if you actually stop to think about why “bad 80’s outfits” read as funny to us, you realize there’s this whole level of computational aesthetics going on about what is bad / good that goes into what “reads” as passe or wrong. And it’s very hard to explain the details of that computation. But it’s real to us. It’s honestly the same reason it’s often hard to explain why shows like Tim & Eric come off as funny, but they were mining this shared universe of reference points from local commercials, late 80’s / early 90’s TV, to just generally disgusting design choices. But how do explain the idea that Heidecker has an uncanny sense for the “exact wrong” wig? It's just an intrinsic response. We know because we laugh.

And here, I feel like I have to do the same exact thing with Carax’s Annette, which is full of all sorts of gnarly choices that make me laugh, but I imagine invites all sorts of temptation for the viewer to ask “wait… is he serious with this right now?”

The answer is no, almost never. Which isn’t to say the emotion behind it isn’t serious, it’s just the presentation of it (the point of which we’ll get to in a second). But first, please understand that Carax knows that it looks bad. It’s something perhaps most evident in the “showbiz” news segments with their bored expressions and the absolute laziest, goofiest photoshops in the world, complete with starkly boring color fonts. He’s clearly not trying to capture the look of those TMZ-like shows. Why? Because we’ve seen him copy aesthetics in the body of work that came before. He can do it. And here, Carax’s making it a specific kind of ugly on purpose. It’s the same reason he turns into a lot of uncanny VFX work (a friend pointed out the digital harshness feels similar to what Lynch did in Twin Peaks: The Return, really “embracing imperfect and oddly off-putting CGI” because it creates a certain unnerved response). And it’s the same reason behind the Normcore clothing, the toxic green pool, the generic football uniforms of the “superbowl,” the exaggerated pixel-y waves and, of course, the titular nightmare dreamscape doll that is Annette herself (I’m half convinced Carax saw the footage of the Renesmee doll). If you think the job of a filmmaker is simply to mimic reality, you would conclude that Carax is a terrible filmmaker who has never seen a comedy show, an episode of TMZ, a hospital, or even a baby. But, you know, he clearly has. So instead, you have to add it all up and understand that he made all these choices on purpose.

Which means, yes, there is a purpose to this.

But even as I get into it, please know that I don’t like talking about Brecht because society has reduced the term “Brechtian” to basically mean “anything stagey where you notice the artifice.” The real answer is far more complicated and probably confined to theater itself. But I don’t really want to get into it because there’s the simple take-away for our purposes. Which is that when you aim for non-naturalism, you are weirdly able to be infinitely more direct in your thematic meanings. That’s because it’s pushing away the “emotional” 1:1 connection of natural drama and purposefully cutting off the audience from that kind of empathy. You can then feed off a kind of “cerebral distance” with the ideas. Which isn’t to say you can’t find emotional resonance in that process, it’s just a different method of getting there. One the film is very much aware of. Take the frequent refrain with Adam Driver’s character on why he became a comedian: “to disarm people. It’s the only way I know to tell the truth without getting killed.” And you can extend that answer to Carax’s approach with the oh-so-silly movie itself.

To wit, imagine the “played straight” version of Annette because it might lead to a whole different kind of ugliness. Imagine the earnest comedy sets and having to believe the reality of those scenes (they’d probably have to hire an actual comedian, as funny actors rarely work in that capacity). Imagine the straight playing of the opera scenes. Imagine the earnestness of them singing about their hum-drum lives. Imagine the tensions of the murder and boat. Imagine the horrible manipulation of propping up a singing child, one which would gnaw at the soul with unforgivable fervor. Imagine it all driving to one of the most nihilistically dark endings imaginable. What would really come out of the “naturalist” expression of all those scenes? Would it be unwatchable? Or a weirdly empathetic portrait of all those horrors precisely because it naturally spends so much time with Driver’s character? Sure, someone could probably make that film. But not Carax. And certainly not for the purposes of what he seems to be exploring here. A film where he’s providing a necessary sense of distance; a comedic, ugly artifice that doesn’t want your empathy, but only to express a sense of unrelenting guilt with abject clarity.

Because at its core, Annette essentially channels Umbrellas of Cherbourg to make a self-annihilating work about a man’s deeply ugly selfhood. But I honestly found it interesting that the ones credited with the story were Ron and Russel Mael AKA the band “Sparks” AKA the ones who wrote all the music for the movie. It certainly makes sense given the non-stop opera, but there are details here that are also so specific to Carax’s own personal life. 

(CW: Discussions of suicide from here on out) Namely, that his wife died by suicide nearly ten years ago and he’s been raising their daughter since she was six. She, now 16, appears alongside Carax in the opening of the movie and is the one it is literally dedicated to. Through this lens, the utter ugliness of the film’s narrative is a bit… worrying. Perhaps even a bit scary. Because this is a film where a character mistreats a wife and child to criminal degrees. And there’s a deeply direct and confessional sense to everything on display here. There’s so many time Driver says “I killed my wife!” that you can’t help but keep thinking “wait… did… did Carax actually kill his wife?!?!” (seriously, there’s almost Philbert levels of directness here). But I’m not inquiring about that seriously. Here it’s doubly important to remind ourselves that we know that’s not the case, which means the self-scourging portrait has another purpose, entirely…

Because survivor’s guilt is a hell of a thing, especially when it mixes with suicide. The idea of losing someone and feeling like it’s your fault is just… so much. Too much, really. Because it’s so easy to magnify every little extra thing you could have done to help them and every terrible thing which helped “push them” over the edge (a metaphor made literal here while foolishly dancing on a boat in a storm). Within the world of the film, Henri is literally haunted by these events. And he is basically a monster of compartmentalization, envy, and raging control issues in that entire process of love and loss. Even his daughter is literally nothing more than a wooden prop, whose voice he can exploit. But there’s no humane understanding of his plight here. Just his eventual realization and stark expression of the worst feelings that one keeps inside.

So yes, it all reads as this massive expression of guilt, one that will be offered no solace by the events of the film. And for all the pushing away of aesthetics, the final scene in which the doll of a daughter is replaced with a real actress, suddenly transforms the emotional language of the movie. It disarms every barrier. It paints starkly the feeling that he has no right to love / be loved, despite wanting to love, and that he must stand alone in the nexus of brutality. It is something that cannot be beat. He can only be stuck in the darkest prison of one his own mind. A true void. And however, real or metaphorical, it’s perhaps best to remember that this is an opera. The genre which gets to be both at once. So this is the feeling.

But ultimately, I’m not sure how I feel about all of it in turn. Though the need to feel something coherent right now is likely a misguided one. It’s easy to want the immediate, transcendent high of Holy Motors, but there’s parts of Pola X that still rattle around in my brain even all these years later. And it comes with the understanding that Carax is an artist who is working with canvas few others are (or better put, get to).This new foray into aesthetic ugliness feels garish in a kind of way that is viscerally funny to me, but one which serves as a counterpoint against the film’s use of old school projection (like on the yacht) that reminded me of the deep myth making in Fellini’s And The Ship Sails On. But both of those serve as counterpoints to the achingly gorgeous sequence of the forest behind the opera stage, which is yet another “compartment” in a movie that is full of them.

Which compartment of contradiction does it truly rest in? It’s a darkly “bad” musical seemingly meant to bait those who really think “musicals are about people singing about what they are literally doing,” but still written by incredible musicians who completely understand that joke. Even better, it’s not a musical, it’s an opera. A genre where “everything is sacred,” which is why it so aims to remove all notions of sacredness from its core approach. I’m practically giggling at the opening intro of “if you need to fart, fart in your head,” but then it goes for the most haunting ideas possible. And it’s a film that personifies people and ugly props and artifice and then suddenly goes for the jugular with its stark, desperate pleas. Which is probably why I feel so many contradictory things when left in Annette’s wake. But I likely got there precisely because it was so brazen in its off-kilter, comedic approach along the way. In the end, to its want and credit, I at least know this…

I have been disarmed.

<3HULK