“So, may we start?” asks Leos Carax.

And as his daughter, yes, his real daughter, approaches him, the opera begins.

But what kind of opera is about to start? A love story?

A musical where there is very little singing and even less dancing…?

Yes, Henry McHenry and Ann Defrasnoux are in love, or so it seems.

He, nicknamed Ape of God, is a narcissistic, provocative, and grotesque showman; she is an ethereal opera singer and apple-eater.

The birth of their daughter/puppet/doll Annette marks and simultaneously tears the veil on an artificial couple.

Although the “child” does not speak and creates no discomfort, other than as a new harmless presence in the house, something insidious creeps into the couple's dynamic.

A premonition on stage and a boat trip with an impending storm will overwhelm past, present, and especially unpredictably future plans.

The formal and structural illogic of the opera mathematically portrays the shipwreck of reference points: the madness of the musical, the empty and superficial texts, the inconsistency of feelings, and the media frenzy accompany the representational apparatus.

Awarded Best Director at Cannes 2021, Annette is presented to the general public nine years after the last film, Holy Motors.

Carax uses the most nerve-wracking, disturbing, irritating musical because he wants to exhaust the viewer, disgust them, satiate them, and nauseate them to say what?

PROVOCATION is the masterful virtue of the irreverent French director, and this time he makes it speak English with an exhausting musical. Why?

A love story without a story, a parenthood without love, a love without a future, a future without a past, a family without a present, a death without pain, a daughter without forgiveness, a rage without catharsis.

An exhausting narrative mechanism solicits the resort to resistance rewarded only by the birth of the child and only at the end where the child herself becomes a person, that per sé unum indifferent to a narcissistic and perverse parenthood.

The child is a sacrificial creature, hoisted on the altar of the beautiful and famous couple, an unsettling and silent being that serves as the stage for the film/world/cinema paradoxical of the French director. The paradox lies in the portrayal of a world, the media, a family, the contemporary one, a context, the cultural one, infected by the virus of existential absurdity that has become ordinary.

If Henry is envious and affected by psychoapathy, Ann is naive and enchanted, and Annette is nature stunned by the survival instinct that makes justice the strength of resistance.

If Ann constantly bites the forbidden fruit, the fall of man, original sin, and the repercussions on all humanity have already occurred: (dis)obedience is daily, and “freedom” is no longer free will.

But the puppet girl becomes human in a Collodian way and rises as an unheard voice and inflexible judge before a miserably non-father parent.

A strong autobiographical imprint floats in the fairy-tale narration of the shipwreck of ragdoll characters subjugated by the loss of orientation… Carax is there, present, and uses the spectators, hypnotizing them with the stark contrast between the unsustainability of the musical and the predetermined inevitability of the human condition.

An Odyssey that Carax self-references to that self of art and life inextricably intertwined.

If the bizarre, eccentric, unpredictable, and extravagant paradox becomes banal, common, and ordinary, nothing is formally more fitting than a stupid but demonic musical to guide the reading on the abyss of false, precarious, and useless existences.

20-Aug-2023 by Beatrice