Annette

I am confused on how I feel about this movie. At times I hated it. At others I was simply fascinated by it. And most interesting to see were the reactions. I've never seen so many people leave the cinema. And at the same time so many of those who did make it to the end be completely flabbergasted once the credits roll. The audience was confused and seemingly expected to see more. Like some Marvel after credits scene explaining or adding something.

The things I hated: In short, at times the movie does seem like a pretentious pseudo-intellectual fart-sniffing contemporary theatre/performance art. The songs.

The things I liked: many things are satirical. And most importantly, the twist at the end grounds the sillyness back to reality and puts it into a new perspective. But also, Adam Driver. The songs.

What an interesting experience overall.

This might be an unpopular opinion here as the film was selected to open Cannes, and so clearly the committee of experts saw a lot of artistic merit to it. To me, however, it felt like a student play that tries so so hard to be avant-garde that it forgets to be anything else.

I went to a premiere in Prague and halfway in, people were leaving the theater in droves. That's not necessarily the sign of a bad film to me - not everything is for everyone. I still wanted to like it: I like stylized films. I enjoy the surreal. I'm here for the modern musical, genre-melding, society critique. But I had to fight the growing urge to leave myself.

The positives first: you can see the budget at work, the set design and photography are fabulous. Even the 4th wall breaking beginning with the director himself kicking off the film was kind of cheekily confident and got me excited. The pacing is intense and there's a lot of energy. The leads are obviously fantastic actors.

None of that saves the film, however. For being so tightly paced and filled with intensity and musical numbers - it's actually really boring. All the songs follow the same lazy pattern and so while you enjoy the first couple, eventually you find out it's really just people singing one sentence over and over to a rock/opera backdrop.

Adam Driver's performance, especially on stage as a comedian, is powerful - but he kind of stays in just one gloomy tortured emo cry baby position and you don't get to see much of his redeeming qualities (like you did in, say, A Star is Born). Marion Cotillard's characters is essentially just a figure head for kindness and purity who doesn't get much real space to act.

The film is long but the story basic and utterly predictable. There is a lot of emotional manipulation. You're shown a lot of "gasp" shots like Adam Driver performing oral sex on his pregnant wife, her wiping herself on the toilet, and the story overall develops into more and more troubling areas. This comes with a growing visceral gut punch: the general reception of the film where I saw it was people were feeling kind of anxious and sick to their stomach. That could be a good thing, some of the most powerful cinema is very visceral and art doesn't have to be pretty - if only there were some real substance to justify that. But if you just show the inevitable tragic decline of a family and tightly pack increasingly disquieting sights and atmosphere - but don't really show any real development to your characters or give the audience a proper chance to care about them because everything is delivered just as a singing chapter title - well what you get is 2.5hrs or visually stunning emotional manipulation that is hollow at its core.

The whole thing left me feeling like an artist who is so preoccupied with being artsy that he forgot what's beautiful about art in the first place. If anyone finds its heart, please point me to it.

"Annette" is not a conventional film musical, instead seeming like something you'd see in a black box theater with a small cast playing multiple roles and some not-quite-avant-garde staging.

The visual style crossfades between mundane, (nighttime motorcycle rides, the same winking lights of Los Angeles seen from the foothills of so many films), magical realism (opera stages that become moonlit glades), and abstract. Intentionally absurdist TMZ-style segments introduce new phases of the story.

The music is repetitive and wan, with Adam Driver producing many of the same thin, scratchy falsetto sounds as Hugh Jackman in "Les Mis" Marion Cotillard alternately signing for herself and obviously dubbed.

The vocal lines often remind me of sections of Sondheim, when he uses quasi-tonal, wan phrasing such as in the song "Barcelona." He uses it much more sparingly than this score, which seldom builds into much melody. This, of course, could be intentional. The important repeated bit of song "we love each other so much" might actually be intended to ironically suggest desperation and insufficiency in the emotion.

The story is simple and deals with cardboard cutouts of characters, by design-- which is why Annette herself is so strangely effective.

This is her film, after all, though Driver's Henry McHenry-- an edgy, self-loathing standup comedian-- is the central focus, really.

Simon Helberg-- somewhat reprising his accompanist role from "Florence Foster Jenkins" has some of the more interesting moments of acting, and is the subject of a particularly bravura circular tracking shot that's the real filmmaking highlight of the latter part of the film.

All in all, an impressive, if bewildering, fever dream of film that is not the sum of its parts, and doesn't add up to much, but will enchant you with its visuals and haunt you with its oversimplified plainsong.

Brankocerny's 6/10 review said it better from a cinephile point of view. From the point of view of a less educated film audience member, I can just say it was a boring opera about problems of boringly predictable famous people. Very repetitive. The start with the director was great, the visuals were very nice for the first few minutes. Then it just becomes annoying.

For most of the film I though there was a critique there on the use of child-actors. In the end it turns out it was just a visuals choice. I can't decide whether the "rich people problems" was a jab at the peers or just self-regard.

Edit: ah, yes, the acting was fine, the songs repetitive. All in all, more niche than I expected, I guess.

I like the main actors here, when I saw the initial trailer some time back I wrote it on my calendar, I was anxious to see it.

It is a very peculiar movie, mostly using the form of singing dialog. A recurring one is the melody "We love each other so much." However as the story moves along we wonder if Driver's stand up comic character really can love anyone.

It is long, I watched it in probably four different sittings, roughly a half-hour each time. I really was entertained by the experimental approach and its emotional extremes. However if you strip it all down it is a plain story. For me the most interesting scene is about 10 minutes from the end, when dad and Annette, now a young girl, do a face-to-face singing number, I was taken aback by how good and with proper emotion the young girl's singing and acting was.

I am glad I watched it, I like to experience all kinds of approaches in movie-making, but I didn't even invite my wife to join me, I know she would not have lasted 15 minutes. I would think most mainstream movie fans would NOT enjoy this one and watch it to its conclusion.

At home, on Amazon streaming.