Annette 4K 2021 Ultra HD 2160p

Story Movie

A stand-up comedian and an opera singer are raising a daughter who discovers she has an unusual gift.

Review 4K Movie

The sixty-year-old Carax's sixth full-length is one of the most unusual films you (and I) have ever seen. Having slipped into wide Russian distribution under the genre department of musicals, this wholly auteuristic picture stumped the mass viewer, while chaining him to the screen and not letting him leave the audience. It's hard to disagree with the common cinephile opinion that after "Holy Motors Corporation," you could expect anything from Carax, so his fifth film was stylistically and conceptually unhinged (with both evaluative shades of the word). "Annette" is as unfashionable as ever, an obscenely soulful striptease by a director who dared to make personal statements back in the era of the emerging postmodern ("Bad Blood," "Lovers of the New Bridge").

I would venture to say that Annette is neither a musical nor a rock opera (although the characters hardly say their lines, but sing every now and then), but a musical parable about the relationship between the Artist and the Muse and their common Child, i.e. the Artifact of Art. For this reason, those who primitively trace Karaks' relationship with Golubeva to the story told in the film are wrong, because the images here are extremely generalized and even artificial (in fact, the effect of unreality and even emasculation of what is happening is created by the totality of the musical environment in which the characters exist). Carax's greatest merit in this film is turning postmodern poetics inside out: where postmodernists combine the high and the low to achieve comic effect, Carax strikingly carves out a spark of tragic authenticity.

"Annette" is an experiment that attempts to tell the story of Big Love, of Death, of the Tragedy of Life without appearing trite and vulgar, an attempt to walk the line that separates the elitist from the kitschy without falling into the latter. The film was created to create this effect of strangeness and novelty: that is why stand-up comedian's performances are so creepy and his image is so strange, combining a protagonist and an antagonist, that is why Annette herself, up to the end, acts as a homunculus doll - simultaneously a terrible and lovely Child of the Artist-Muse relationship and, not least, a Toy in the hands of the Artist himself.

After the incomprehensible, misunderstood, opaque film Holy Motors Corporation, Karax himself is perceived as a buffoon, the laughingstock of the audience, with whom one can only play genre games, cheating its expectations and publicly bashing himself in sessions of sadomasochistic filmstriptease (my personal favorite scene is the episode of Cotillard's character's first performance, when she goes deep into the forest, never ceasing to sing: it is extremely cinematically expressive and simply beautiful!)

If "Paula X" was once laughed at, reducing all of its cinematic richness to the seemingly banal formula "The Artist Must Suffer," then the same may be true of "Annette": it will be interpreted in an utterly autobiographical way ("it's no accident that in the beginning, appearing together with her in the frame, Karax shows the film to his daughter Nastya!"). By undertaking sometimes risky and even shocking techniques (such as singing during sex, including oral sex and bodily excretions), Karax actually pursues one goal - to create an integral portrait of the artistic process, which includes not only creativity, but also communication of the Artist and the Muse, including bodily (in this he is no innovator: remember "Mantissa" by Fowles).

He perceives the Fruit of Art as a cute and, at the same time, creepy toy, a marionette, on which, if desired, one can make a lot of money (for this, the Artist only needs to exploit it, that is, sell it to the masses and sell himself), Carax and his character, naked for the viewer's pleasure to his anti-heroic, abominable core, encourage us and ourselves to see Annette as a living and independent being (this is what the final dialogue, Henry's altercation with his daughter, is for). The fruit of creativity, the Artifact of Art is estranged from the artist and lives its own life - happy is the one who understands this, for our children themselves are the fruit of our creativity, for sex (not safe, but real) is also creativity (which is why the characters sing in the midst of it).

"Annette," despite the emotionally scratchy finale, is not only a stylistically heterogeneous film, not only something multi-component and complex, it is at the same time very whole and simple, because it comes from the heart, has as its foundation a living, lived experience, something that hurts and torments. That is why it is so pleasant that this generally simple story is not trivial and vulgar, although sometimes it is so difficult for Karaks and his characters to walk on the edge of sincerity, separating them from the ocean of tastelessness.