Annette
Venice Airport, July 6, an ungodly hour in the early morning.
I am typing in a state of somnolence, lulled by the chugging and whirring of the espresso machines, clutching my laptop and a handful of bus and plane tickets that promise to drop me in Cannes in time for lunch. By the time this first dispatch is over, I’ll have hopped on my first flight in two years, picked up a badge, set camp in town, spat into my first COVID test (courtesy of the festival, which has asked non-vaccinated attendees to take tests every 48 hours) and watched the opening film, Leos Carax’s Adam-Driver-and-Marion-Cotillard-musical Annette. I do not expect to be any less sleep-deprived than I am already.
But that’s all part of the Cannes package—the sensory overload, and the chronic fatigue that comes with it. In my tote bag this year I’ve chucked a copy of Roger Ebert’s journal from the 1987 edition, “Two Weeks in the Midday Sun” (look it up if you haven’t—it’s a vivid, and still surprisingly accurate description of what the “Cannes madness” amounts to). Ebert likes to claim only jet-lagged Americans walk around Cannes in their sleep; I beg to differ. Three or four days in and nearly everyone on the Croisette turns into a sleep- and hunger-deprived zombie, schlepping and queuing and writing and watching—watching obsessively, compulsively, fueled by coffee, cigarettes, and the vague promise that the next film will be Worth The Trip Alone. And where on earth would that mirage feel more plausible than here? For all its ridiculous displays of glamour and wealth—for all the yachts besieging the Palais des Festivals, the Ferraris springing back and forth, the people marching along the beach in evening dresses at 10 am—this is still Cannes, the place where the cinema’s finest show their finest, and arguably the foremost platform responsible for heralding a good amount of the year’s most significant films. Which isn’t to say that Cannes is everything—or to downplay the dangers of that solipsistic and extremely contagious belief that there’s nothing in the world more important than this overpriced town and these early July days.
But Cannes 2021 is no ordinary festival. It’s been two years since the last edition, and it’s difficult not to regard the next two weeks as a much-needed and belated sign that things are—slowly and imperfectly, perhaps—moving forward. Hence the mix of exhilaration and apprehension hovering above the Croisette, and the questions I’m still wrestling with as my EasyJet touches ground in Nice. How will Cannes respond to all the expectations and pressures from this hiatus? What will the films have to say about the past few months? And just what kind of cinema will emerge out of the next two weeks?
For starters, the official competition has already morphed into a sort of phoenix. Once the festival surrendered to the pandemic, a number of films due to premiere in 2020 were placed on hibernation and promised another slot in 2021. Such was the case for Paul Verhoeven’s Benedetta, Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch, and, yes, Leos Carax’s Annette. Apichatpong Weerasethakul will be in town with the first film set outside his native Thailand, Memoria; Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car will yield another Murakami Haruki adaptation (the last to premiere here was Lee Chang-dong’s stellar Burning in 2018—quite a predecessor). There’ll also be room for a new Mia Hansen-Løve, Bergman’s Island, and for Nadav Lapid’s Ahed’s Knee—a follow-up to his 2019 Berlinale winner, Synonyms. Personally, I’m looking forward to seeing other familiar faces who’ve already graced the Croisette in other sections and have now graduated to the main lineup. Sean Baker, whose The Florida Project premiered in the Directors’ Fortnight sidebar here in 2017, has been promoted among the Palm d’Or hopefuls with Red Rocket; same goes for Julia Ducournau, who’s found a slot with Titane five years after her Raw nabbed the FIPRESCI Prize in the Critics Week.
“Promoted” and “graduated” can be fairly misleading words. There’s no denying the festival’s hierarchies, and the different weight each program and sidebar carries. Where exactly films premiere here might be fairly trivial to outsiders, but usually influences their reception and visibility well beyond the fest. Yet to hold the official competition label as an unassailable mark of quality would be a gross simplification. More often than not, it’s in the parallel sidebars that the festival showcases some of its more daring—and memorable—offerings, works by auteurs, auteurs-in-the-making, and new voices alike. Among the entries in the Un Certain Regard section there’ll be Kogonada’s follow up to his 2017 Columbus, After Yang, as well as new works by Eskil Vogt, Justin Chon, and Aleksey German Jr. Much of the attention around the Directors Fortnight has been monopolized by Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir Part II, but there are many other titles worth getting excited about this year. Miguel Gomes and Maureen Fazendeiro will unveil The Tsugua Diaries; Luàna Bajrami (previously seen starring opposite Noémi Merlant and Adèle Haenel in Portrait of a Lady on Fire) will celebrate her directorial debut with The Hill Where Lionesses Roar. Pre-festival rumors suggest Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis’s The Tale of King Crab will be worth seeking out, and I can’t wait to take a gander at Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman’s Neptune Frost, an Afro-Futurist musical featuring an intersex runaway and a coltan miner (talk about daring oddballs…). Elsewhere, the Cannes Premiere slate will make room for a new Hong Sang-soo—In Front of Your Face—while the Special Screenings program will treat us to another archival documentary by Sergei Loznitsa—Babi Yar. Context—a new Kennedy inquiry by Oliver Stone—JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass—and two directorial debuts: Noémie Merlant’s first feature, Mi Iubita Mon Amour, and Charlotte Gainsbourg’s portrait of her mother Jane Birkin, Jane Par Charlotte.
If that all sounds overwhelming, well… welcome to Cannes. Having nabbed a badge and jotted down a very tentative schedule, I made my way to the Debussy theatre to catch Carax’s Annette. That the year’s opening film was one of Cannes’ most anticipated is an understatement. It was the first film from Carax since his 2012 Holy Motors, and it’d see the French iconoclast team up with the equally influential Ron and Russell Mael, the brothers behind the band Sparks (if the name doesn’t ring familiar, Edgar Wright has directed a passionate doc-homage about the siblings, The Sparks Brothers, giving fans and novices alike a look into the Maels’ chameleonic genius). And that, to me, was the film’s true selling point—not so much the idea of seeing Driver sing next to Cotillard, but the prospect of basking for two hours and twenty minutes in all the surrealism, playfulness, and eccentricity that Carax and Sparks’ oeuvres are suffused in. The director and musicians-turned-scribes felt like a marriage made in cinematic heaven. This probably explains why the underwhelming affair Annette morphs into feels so much more disappointing.
Annette
It’s not that Annette isn’t eccentric, it’s just that its vitality is so frustratingly reined in that what you’re left with is a film that strives for exuberance and inspiration well beyond its reach. Driver plays Henry, a comedian megastar whose gigs seem to consist largely in spitting self-deprecating ramblings into a mic while sporting nothing but boxers and a green bath robe; Cotillard is Ann, a celestial soprano enjoying what looks like a pop star cult following, a Callas-esque diva everyone struggles to place next to a man known to the masses as “The Ape of God.” And for a while—a rather short while—Annette does get some mileage from juxtaposing their personas, at least until Carax introduces the couple’s newborn child, who’s… not exactly human. Designed as a papier-mâché marionette, the eponymous Annette is a Pinocchio-like puppet who seems to exist largely as a punching bag for Driver’s creative frustrations, and, once the child inherits her mother’s singing talents, a golden goose to even greater riches for the man to reap.
For this, title notwithstanding, remains Henry’s tale—and Carax gives Driver ample room to play out the man’s self-hating histrionics, anxieties, and narcissistic delusions. But hard as he may try, Driver alone can’t shoulder a film that seems unsure of what it wants to be, much less how it intends to keep the momentum going. Nothing about Annette’s story feels unexpected or riveting. Underpinning Henry and Ann’s drama is the same notion of fame as a zero-sum game that undergirded the A Star Is Born trilogy since the 1930s: once Ann’s star grows brighter, Henry’s must dim out. You know where Carax is leading you, and can easily predict every beat in the Maels’ script. That the plot feels formulaic isn’t a problem, per se; it becomes one when the film’s only idea of moving things forward boils down to a rehashing of the same points, with little life or zing to sustain them. Even Sparks’ tracks, sacrilegious as it may sound, at times lack oomph and wit: far from helping to carry the narrative forward, their repeated refrains end up slowing matters down to a dull impasse.
Is this a takedown of showbiz and its doyens as an irreparably vacuous, empty universe? A j’accuse leveled at our own voyeurism as audiences? A study in paternal depression? Of the relationship between art and artist? The problem with Annette isn’t that it doesn’t quite know which of its many angles to flesh out; it’s that it doesn’t seem to have many compelling things to say about any of them. Sure, there’s a smattering of humorous interludes along the way—Driver and Cotillard engaged in cunnilingus while crooning “We Love Each Other So Much”; audiences turning into Greek choruses; Henry struggling to come to terms with fatherhood—but they are all too few, and far between. Paradoxically, and frustratingly, Annette starts with a preamble that promises something completely different, a fourth-barrier breaking singalong number in the vein of David Byrne’s American Utopia. It paves the way for a film that remains tucked deep beneath Annette’s empty chrysalis: a far more captivating and electrifying journey that never was. Far be it from me to judge a book by its cover—suffice to say that, as Cannes day two is upon us, I can’t wait to see what things outside the main lineup will look like.