Annette review – a maddening and kaleidoscopic love affair

A fairytale, an opera, a nightmare, a farce, a heartbreak, a disco, a magic trick. Annette is all of these things and yet none at all – a kaleidoscopic love affair, a collection of the tiny fragments that still remain once everything has fallen to pieces. Some of its truths are clear and unshakeable: it’s a Leos Carax film, an immense showcase for the French director’s baffling mind. It’s a story (in both script and songs) by Sparks, the indefatigable duo reshaping the face of pop music for the last six decades. It’s a battle of wits, egos, competing minds and spirits, in a magnetic emotional triangle between Adam Driver, Marion Cotillard and Simon Helberg. And then it’s also about the curious little girl who gives the film its name: Annette.

But it begins with her parents, Henry McHenry (Driver) and Ann Defrasnoux (Cotillard). He’s a stand-up comedian and she’s an opera singer, and they love each other so much (they tell us this, quite a few times, in a song called “We Love Each Other So Much”). They fit together like puzzle pieces, two esoteric magnets forcefully drawn together against all odds. Linking up after an evening of work, he tells her he killed his audience. She smiles, sighs, and says she saved hers.

Annette is most potent in its complex rumination on love when it stops making sense, when the reciprocal feelings fall out of sync and the give-and-take is suddenly awfully unfair. When opposites spiral out of control rather than feeding and completing each other. Driver is staggering and maddening as Henry, a slab of muscle and self-loathing, so blinded by the dazzling praise of an audience – both at his shows and all over the world in the form of online whispers – that he loses sight of the one he loves. Ann suffers this by shrinking, absorbing his toxic energy as if hoping once he’s let it all out the man she fell in love with will rise up again.

It’s all in Cotillard’s eyes: the pain and patience, the unspoken understanding that this is happening for a reason – it must be – and at some point, somehow, it’ll all have been worth it. She’s mournful but never melodramatic, quietly proving why she’s reliable like nobody else. And anyway, if none of it's worth it, at least they have Annette.

She is their miracle baby, this strange and beautiful creature Carax brings to life in the form of a wooden puppet rather than a real human girl. Did he want to limit any biological distress? To distract her parents from their own broken parts? To find something a bit more exciting and inspiring than the rotten flesh and blood things we have to put up with in this world? Nobody questions her form – and once you work with Annette you slowly forget what she is physically, only focusing on what she means spiritually. And here lies the complex heart of the film, in which its emotional core is deep and sincere and hopeful, yet delivered in a way no other piece of cinema has ever really dared before.

The humans, too, do a pretty good job of wrestling with their own fallacies. Simon Helberg plays a lovelorn conductor with the same melancholy that first launched Driver’s career into the stratosphere, and Henry’s relationship with his reluctant friend ends up being Annette’s most curious bond – which, when you consider how wise and sad it is about the limits of egocentric male artistry and the fundamental danger of such power, makes complete sense. Plus, every time the two men stand together you realise Driver is, physically, nothing more than Helberg on steroids.

Carax can be credited, of course, with so much of the strength of Annette. But its beguiling narrative comes from the Sparks brothers, Ron and Russell Mael. They have always been alarmingly sincere – not so different to David Byrne, who flailed his limbs around in American Utopia and spoke about bicycles and houses and the soft, sticky parts of the human brain. You’re always waiting for a punchline that never comes, a bitterness to slice through the weird honesty and steadfast belief in love and the complexity of the very literal, boring stuff we do in our lives as magical.

When Henry and the conductor are travelling around the world, they say so in song. When Annette is getting nervous ahead of a performance, a commentator reminds us that she is a baby. It’s hit and miss, though, sometimes asking to be laughed at in the kitsch banality of it all – but other times there is a rare, special strength to such direct laments. There’s no subtext, really, but also no lack of things to say. Melodically, this was never going to be another La La Land, and opera always has demanded patience and stamina from its audience – who are almost always rewarded for it. Here the music swings from glam rock to orchestral tragedies, which never can or should please everyone. Who dares wins: or at least dies happy trying.

It is, in the end, about trying – about giving, working, growing, loving, until suddenly you realise you haven’t done enough and have to live with the consequences. “Can’t I love you?” Henry asks his daughter gently, checking both the possibility and the permission of the only truth you should be able count on, come what may. Annette questions the fabric of reality – probing the inevitable and challenging the easy, tender, warm feelings that usually help you get through it. It’s full of holes and hides so much in its alien corners. But when you find something within it that speaks to you, about the things you hold dear and those that threaten to snatch them away, it’s more terrifying and devastating than any one fairytale, opera, nightmare, or love story could ever be on its own.

Annette is in UK cinemas from 3 September.