by TWY
It is only natural for Leos Carax to announce that “breathing will not be tolerated” during his show, for the fact that we might feel utterly breathless anyway. But for those familiar with the rest of Carax’s gritty emotional oeuvre, the joy provoked by Annette’s opening number is also a bit alarming, we became a bit too dazzled with the happiness of movement. But this happiness nevertheless is confirmed, for the audience, the joy of seeing this French enfant-terrible almost a decade after Holy Motors, and for Carax himself, the joy of his grand return to cinema and fiction, in his first “American film,” set in Los Angeles. “So, May We Start,” signaled by Carax and co-writer The Sparks Brothers, and for them, to start something is important, like Mr. Oscar in the previous film, to “restart” himself every ten minutes, because one must discover this joy, this happiness of starting something. But this time, this would be the only time the movie “starts,” for the film will be devoured in history, ancient history that couldn’t turn itself back.
After the bombardment of creativity of Holy Motors from 2012, we wonder how far Carax can go in his filmmaking, or is there anything further for him to do? Quickly enough, an answer is provided from far away – an almost incomprehensible recording: “Under the pale moonlight, my friend Pierrot….” By looking at the end credits, one discovered that it is “the earliest human voice recorded in history”: the year was 1860, the audio signal was transcribed on paper as waves (not unlike the optical soundtrack used in sound cinema), and was only deciphered almost 150 years later. In Holy Motors, it was the locomotion image by Étienne-Jules Marey (around 1882) that opened the film, and this time Carax found himself something even more ancient, perhaps his notion that the history of cinema had began even earlier than the first moving image, when the first human voice was recorded. This notion is, then, rendered into the voices of his characters. Just like Baby Annette’s primitive voice, this history of voice now takes hold, a miracle that was born out of ecstasy and fear, something that Henry McHenry (Adam Driver) could not see or comprehend, something that belongs to a faraway place. And so throughout the majority of the film, Baby Annette can only be a puppet, part material, and part “movie magic,” and only the sourness puppet would remain in Henry’s jail cell, a ghostly souvenir.
Annette tells a deceptively simple story: Driver plays an angry comedian, and his fury and self-loathing becomes his lethal weapon against his audience and their laughter; Ann (Marion Cotillard) is a “sacred” opera singer, who dies (magnificently) every day on stage, and then as a performer, bows to her audience; Simon Helberg plays Ann’s unnamed accompanist then conductor, and his somber love for Ann is no match for the fiery energy of Henry (the spinning shot of him conducting and confessing provokes vertigo and the sentiment of a classic tragedy); and finally, Annette, daughter of Ann and Henry, the inhuman/human figure who hides her secret behind the puppet and the voice, prompting cinematographer Caroline Champetier to film her with equal parts of directness and ambiguity, those crystal clear close-ups of her is not revealing what she will become, when the chorus sings: “Something is about to break, but it isn’t clear….“
“Is it something we should cheer? Is it something we should fear?” Doubtlessly, there is confusion around this creature that is Annette/Annette: artificiality of the baby has been made abundantly clear, as clear as the shot of Leos Carax himself, appearing with his daughter, in the opening scene. When something can be so easily looked at, one must be extra cautious. Why does the filmmaker film himself? In Holy Motors, although it is also Carax who “opened” the film, the imputation seems much more opaque, but here, the director’s face was filmed in close-up with great clarity. But may I suggest that there is a kind of pain implied there, but remains hidden until the very end of the film, when Adam Driver appears for the last time as Henry, whose grey, short hair and mustache made him, eerily, a copy of Leos Carax himself. Imagine this particular pain: an artist wants to create a figure for his character, but other than himself, he can’t find anything else, and so, taking it as a last resort, he has to transform his actor into himself because he knows that this is the only figure that remains, nothing but himself: “My house was broken in last night, bastard stole all my jokes.”
And yet, the author faces another problem, a physical instinct (once again, please allow me to fictionalize): he can’t look at his own image, and he can’t bear listening to himself. Audio recording is not exactly precise mechanical reproduction: when the human voice from the vocal cords is transcribed into digital data, a mutation of form took place, perhaps unobservable, but it provokes an instinctual fear from the owner of the voice – what he hears now is only a variation, an echo from another place, a ghost, even, telling him that he has never really listened to his voice before. With the magic of cosmetics, Adam Driver mutants throughout the film. Carax, of course, connects with this body, and he understands the creature the first time he lay eyes on him, just like how he found Denis Lavant who starred in almost all of his previous films; otherwise, there will be nowhere, no bodies for the filmmaker to embody his demonic energy. Not only a voice, but Adam Driver’s Henry also releases his whole spectrum of sound from his body, with his flesh clashing with the microphone which he drags around the theatrical stage, while the voice of the audience becomes artificial, “fake,” and their supposed laughter and cries become echos of a mixed tape: “Hahaha….” “Yes, Yes, Yes!” “No!” The laugh dissolves, becomes a terror, like what David Lynch showed in his “sitcom” Rabbit. While a tape can be rewinded for every performance, the performer is slowly drained of his metamorphic energy; ultimately, he must return to where he came from – the auteur himself. As the film races toward the end, Adam Driver is becoming Leos Carax, but that he must not. When approaching his event horizon, our auteur realizes this horror: he can no longer stomach his sight, and so? The film must end there, when the jailed Driver, dressed almost identical to the filmmaker, uttered the final line of the fiction: “Stop watching me.” And so, stop watching Carax, watch Adam Driver; stop watching the “auteur,” watch the actor (fiction), such is the paradox of Leos.
In a way, Annette is not the breakthrough we had imagined post-Holy Motors, nor a backward failure of cliche according to certain distractors; instead, what we see are something very old being re-conjured. In the end, by incarcerating his figure, Carax/Henry becomes a symbol of a certain history of cinema, a history of cinema that is facing its demise: half-American, half-French. The American half is a cursed cinema, what Godard called “the last chapter of western civilization.” After the unbounded time-space of Holy Motors, Carax returns to something old: the linear time of American melodramas, on impossible love; and so it is impossible for him to transcend life and death à la Mr. Oscar, he can only be Adam Driver, a movie star that goes towards the abyss of The Crowd by King Vidor and A Place in the Sun by Stevens (both films Carax referenced, one literally, the other figuratively), where everything is the dream of the Hollywood studio: when the fatal lovers waltz in the storm, one can see that the waves behind is just a back-projected image, a place where the death of the hero marks the end of the narrative. Meanwhile, it is a French film (beaten and disappeared by American films, according to Godard), and with that, Carax brings in more ancient histories: the French impressionist films, the phantom of Jean Epstein, superimposed images of Abel Gance, the forest of Louis Delluc, theater of Jean Renoir, etc., all forming a terrifying yet beautiful grave for its eventual death. And if this particular history of cinema is destroyed at the end of Carax’s film, then it is the most spectacular death we’ve ever witnessed in cinema, so infuriating and exciting that something new will be born. The perfection of Driver’s performance is indeed the nightmare of Carax: without the body, there will no longer be a film, while Cotillard and Annette, the puppet, their respective mystery is something unknowable. And so they descend into somewhere, becoming figures of certain dizziness. The phantom performance of the wife is a reluctant one, only an attempt to express certain things through another language, and yet her real self, like Annette, doesn’t belong to this language; it can’t be seen. It is only at the end, the future will reveal itself. This is why this moment, Annette’s “real” body appears, but it is no longer the story of Henry; another resurrection is awaiting.
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