Opiniões dos críticos

Carax’s wonderful direction, Maels’ impossibly charming music, and what I can only call some of the best acting performances of the year, make Annette practically airtight.

Yes, Annette is an extravagantly ridiculous affair, a pop opera... shot through with the wry humour that has always characterised the Mael brothers’ music. Yet at the heart of its swirling strangeness lies something of real truth and beauty...

Carax is a singular film-maker and there are some ravishingly composed scenes. But throughout, your literal brain will be having a hard time of it.

Though it is a musical, it is not of any cine-musical tradition. Instead, it offers lyrically repetitive songs, ghostly intrusions, homicide, singing puppets and a heavy dash of melodrama.

There is a delicacy and a sincerity to their work [Mael brothers] – a careful manipulation of who sings when and who talks when, so that music itself becomes a vessel for its characters’ emotional unravelling.

Annette is an ambitious beast, on the whole, tackling issues of fame, romance, the power of the media, parenthood and artistry but most importantly it is a tale of misogyny.

Sparks may be fascinated by the entertainment world, but they are sharply aware of its hypocrisies and moral bankruptcy. Here they and Carax take potshots at artistic jealousy, the exploitation of child stars, toxic masculinity and the self-consuming insanity of celebrity culture.

This is a truly inspiring production from Carax and Sparks who have given us a commendably dense, complex and beautifully acted production.

Riffing off the performance of everyday contemporary living as well as the farce of celebrity culture, the line between personal love and public adoration is drawn, and Annette creates a fantasia of rhythm that rides off the beats of modern life.

Although it keys into the ill-fated romanticism of early works like Boy Meets Girl and Les Amants Du Pont-Neuf — few filmmakers have embraced the pain of lost love as a theme as fulsomely as Carax — Annette is really a film about how true love can come undone by (male) egotism run rampant.

Carax is incapable of cliché and since when was flawless interesting anyway? In an age where blockbusters are watched between scrolling, there is something oddly heroic about a film this filled with urgent, handmade flights of imagination.

Possibly, Carax was hoping for the sort of frisson between performer and genre seen in Martin Scorsese’s New York, New York... The difference in Annette is that Driver’s dourness is replicated rather than offset by everything around him. The movie becomes not merely the story of a misogynist but one that reproduces his misogyny on every level.