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    ‘Annette’ Review: Love Hurts

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    Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard are star-crossed lovers in this hallucinatory musical, written by Sparks and directed by Leos Carax.“Annette” is a musical about the ill-starred romance between two artists, a description that suggests obvious kinship with “La La Land” and “A Star is Born.” Not to play algorithm or anything, but if you liked those movies, you will probably like this one too.Or maybe not. While it belongs, more or less, to the durable genre of backstage musical, “Annette” aims to be something darker and stranger than another angsty melodrama about the entanglements of ambition and love. It has some modern opera in its DNA — a lurid strand of violence, madness and demonic passion that evokes pre-World War II Vienna or Berlin as much as classic Hollywood. Rather than bursting into song or breaking into dance at opportune moments, the characters stream their tormented consciousnesses through lyrics that are never as simple as they sound.“We love each other so much.” That is the refrain that sticks in your head as you attend to the tragic tale of Henry McHenry (Adam Driver) and Ann Desfranous (Marion Cotillard), a performance artist and an operatic soprano whose marriage is catnip for the tabloid media. Their love is the film’s premise and its central dramatic problem. It’s also, in a way, a red herring. The sexual bliss and emotional rapport that fill the first act give way to anger and alienation, but this isn’t just a love story with a sad ending. It’s more of a case study, a critique of the romantic mythology on which its appeal would seem to depend.A collaboration between Ron and Russell Mael — better known as the long-lived, pigeonhole-defying band Sparks — and the director Leos Carax, “Annette” opens with an overture in the key of anti-realism. The Mael brothers, who wrote the script as well as the songs, are in the recording studio. Carax and his daughter, Nastya, are behind the mixing board. The cast and crew walk out into the street, and Driver and Cotillard slowly move into character. He puts on a flowing dark wig and then a motorcycle helmet. She climbs into a black SUV. They are now Henry and Ann. The boundary between artifice and actuality has been clearly marked for us; for these two it will be blurry, permeable and treacherous.Carax, whose feverishly imaginative features include “Pola X” and “Holy Motors,” has never had much use for the naturalism that serves most filmmakers as a default setting. The world of “Annette” has some familiar place names (including Tokyo, London and Rio, though most of it takes place in Los Angeles), but it is a land beyond the literal, a figment of stage design, dream logic and hallucinatory expressionism. The fact that the characters sing more than they talk — even during sex — is in some ways the least strange thing about the movie, which casts a series of mechanical puppets in the title role.Annette is the name of Ann and Henry’s daughter, and to explain her centrality to the narrative may be to risk a spoiler or two. Not that the plot is terribly intricate or surprising; it unfolds with the relentless momentum of a nightmare. First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes Annette in the baby carriage. What follows is drunkenness and murder; shipwreck, ghosts and guilt.But let’s go back to the beginning, to Henry and Ann in their season of mutual enchantment. Though each has a flourishing career, it’s Henry who claims most of the attention. That’s partly charisma, partly narcissism, and entirely consistent with his identity as an artist. He is the star and author of “The Ape of God,” a one-man show (with backup singers) that traffics in the kind of belligerent self-display that popular culture sometimes mistakes for honesty.Bursting onto the stage in a hooded bathrobe that falls open to reveal tight boxer briefs and an impressively sculpted torso, Henry harangues the audience with intimate, often obnoxious confessions. Shame and bravado are the alternating currents of his act, yoked by hyper-articulate, cynical self-consciousness. The audience laughs, though Henry isn’t telling jokes so much as daring the public to take his aggression seriously.Ron Mael (in tie) and Russell Mael (in black) wrote the film’s script and songs. The brothers, better known as the band Sparks, also appear in this opening scene of the movie.Amazon StudiosIs he an internal critic of toxic masculinity or an exceptionally magnetic example of it? That may be a distinction without a difference. With Henry, as with some of his hypothetical real-life analogs, it’s hard to separate the art from the artist because the defiance of such a separation is the whole point of his art.Ann is a different kind of artist, and a less insistent presence in the film. She seems, at times, to recede in the shadow of her husband’s larger, louder personality. This can seem like a failure of imagination on the part of the filmmakers, who depict her more as the object of Henry’s desire, jealousy and resentment rather than as a creative force in her own right. She has more in common with the Cotillard characters in “Public Enemies” and “Inception” than the ones in “Rust and Bone” or “La Vie en Rose.”That imbalance turns out to be crucial to this film’s indictment of the cruelty that is excused in the name of genius, its unsparing dissection of male entitlement. This is less a love story than a monster movie, about a man incapable of grasping the full reality of other people, including his own wife and child. (The “not all men” objection is embodied by Simon Helberg, playing a conductor who is Henry’s sometime rival for Ann’s affection.) The consequences are lethal, and the final reckoning is as devastating as anything I’ve seen in a recent film, musical or not.Driver, some of whose best roles to date have been as troubled men of the theater (see also “Girls” and “Marriage Story”), doesn’t waste energy in trying to make Henry likable or in overselling his villainy. Instead, he’s entirely believable, not because you understand Henry’s psychological makeup, but precisely because you can’t. His megalomania distorts everything. He’s not larger than life, but he thinks he is, and Driver’s performance is perfectly scaled to that contradiction.“Annette” masters its own paradoxes. It’s a highly cerebral, formally complex film about unbridled emotion. A work of art propelled by a skepticism about where art comes from and why we value it the way we do. A fantastical film that attacks some of our culture’s most cherished fantasies. Utterly unreal and completely truthful.AnnetteRated R for Sturm und Drang. Running time: 2 hour 19 minutes. Watch on Amazon. More

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      Now Sparks Can Confuse Fans on the Big Screen

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      The musical brothers Ron and Russell Mael are known for catchy songs and perplexing shifts. But they longed to be in films. This summer they’re part of two.Sparks is a band unlike any other. Ron and Russell Mael — the brothers who have made up the eccentric, unclassifiable duo for more than 50 years — have played a pivotal, if unheralded, role in multiple musical movements, from glam rock to new wave to synth-pop.Their witty, hyper-literate songs, along with the singer Russell’s good looks and keyboardist Ron’s deadpan, glowering stage presence, made Sparks icons of a sort in Europe, but never more than a cult band in the United States. With 25 albums to their name, they have often followed up their biggest moments with radical shifts in style that thrilled loyal fans but baffled more casual listeners.In 2017, the music-obsessed director Edgar Wright, fresh off the success of “Baby Driver,” went to see Sparks perform in Los Angeles. For years, he had been telling his friends that someone needed to make a documentary about the group, and as he looked at the audience, which ranged from teenagers to graying 60-somethings, and the weird mix of celebrities in attendance, he insistently repeated the idea to his friend, the filmmaker Phil Lord — who told him to make the movie himself.“I thought, if not me, then who would do it?” Wright said in a recent video conversation.Four years later, “The Sparks Brothers” is reaching theaters, an exhaustive, proudly overstuffed two-hour-20-minute celebration of a group described in the film as “successful, underrated, hugely influential and overlooked at the same time.” In addition to interviews with the enigmatic Maels, Wright conducted 80 interviews, talking with Sparks fans like Beck, Flea, members of Duran Duran, Mike Myers and Neil Gaiman, as well as collaborators and associates.Edgar Wright filming the Maels in Japan. If there’s one takeaway from the band’s story, the director said, “it’s about the persistence of vision.”Richie Starzec/Focus FeaturesOne theme in the documentary is the Maels’ lifelong interest in film, and their multiple near-misses in trying to bring their music to the big screen, including a proposed collaboration with the French comedian Jacques Tati and a project with Tim Burton. So it’s ironic that just weeks after “The Sparks Brothers” arrives, they have another movie release: “Annette,” a musical written by the Maels, directed by Leos Carax, and starring Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard. The story of a comedian and opera singer who give birth to a daughter with a “unique gift,” it will open the Cannes Film Festival in July.“Even before we had a band, the merging of music and movies just seemed so perfect,” Ron, 75, said, adding, “To be sitting on a movie set in Brussels and watching Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard singing something you wrote — it’s surreal, way beyond what we expected.” (Carax was unavailable for comment.)Wright presented his idea to the Maels that night he saw them onstage, but they expressed some trepidation, for the same reasons they had turned down previous offers for a documentary.“We always say that we don’t like looking back because we think it kind of paralyzes you,” said Russell, 72, encapsulating the constant creative forward motion that has defined the band’s oddly incomparable history. “The proposition of doing a documentary is kind of the opposite of that, and in our minds we thought, is it like an obituary in some sense?”During a video call, Russell added that the endurance of the Maels’ partnership also seemed potentially problematic. “Sparks’ story isn’t the standard fare of a lot of music documentaries,” he said. “There’s no drug casualties, we don’t have that conflict of other bands with brothers in the band — so are there enough dramatic elements to make it interesting?”To Wright, on the contrary, their perseverance was exactly the point. “That’s the inspiring part,” he said. “Every other band story is about people squandering their talent, and at a certain point you lose sympathy. The fact that Sparks have lasted so long is partly because they’re always close to success but never mainstream. They’ve managed to exist in this sweet spot where they can keep going, but they never have to sell out.”To the surprise of many, the Maels were born not in Britain, but in Southern California, and were even star athletes in high school. They started playing in groups while attending the University of California, Los Angeles, inspired by the spiky spirit of the Who and the Kinks and by French New Wave cinema. Their band, Halfnelson, was championed by Todd Rundgren, but their 1971 debut album flopped. (Closing a circle, Sparks and Rundgren released the new song “Your Fandango” earlier this year.) They moved to England in 1973, after taking on the name Sparks.Russell and Ron Mael in the documentary. They got their start in the ’70s and continue to make music.via Focus FeaturesThat was the start of a crazy roller coaster career (including an appearance in the 1977 disaster movie flop “Rollercoaster”). The dramatic “This Town Ain’t Big Enough for Both of Us” reached No. 2 on the British charts in 1974. After hooking up with pioneering disco producer Giorgio Moroder, “The Number One Song in Heaven” (1979) was not only a huge club record, but also created a blueprint for dance-based electro-pop of acts like the Human League and New Order.Sparks’ theatrical presentation, from their album covers to their stage production, added to the allure. “What really stuck with me,” Wright said, “is these two performers who were staring down the camera at you, in sharp contrast to a lot of acts who would smile — it was quite unnerving.”Their most notorious signature is Ron’s mustache, alternately compared with that of Adolf Hitler or Charlie Chaplin. In Paul McCartney’s 1980 music video for “Coming Up,” in which he dresses as an array of rock stars from Buddy Holly to Frank Zappa, he appears behind a keyboard with Ron’s unmistakable scowl and facial hair.Teaming up with Jane Wiedlin of the Go-Go’s, who was dating Russell at the time, Sparks had a genuine MTV hit in 1983 with “Cool Places.” By the time the lush, pulsing “When Do I Get to Sing ‘My Way’” was the top airplay record of 1994 in Germany, they were being accused of copying the artists they had inspired.But most of these hits were followed with rapid musical left turns, as if the group was eager to shed any expectations that might come with popular success. In “The Sparks Brothers,” Ron says, “we think it’s important to do something that’s polarizing.”Sometimes the results are gloriously weird (in “My Baby’s Taking Me Home,” the lyrics consist of the title phrase repeated more than 100 times), and sometimes they’re more confrontational: When a label executive suggested they make an album of music to dance to, they responded with a record titled “Music You Can Dance To” (the label dropped them), and when the idea of a project with the band Franz Ferdinand surfaced, the first song they sent to the other group was called “Collaborations Don’t Work.” (The resulting 2015 album, “FFS,” was a major critical success.)Michelle Groskopf for The New York TimesBoth Maels, though, deny that there’s anything willfully destructive in their musical choices. “Within pop music, within three-minute songs, the exciting thing is to see how you can reshape the formula and still come up with something provocative that hasn’t been done,” Russell said. “You’re always searching for that new thing you can impose on the givens of pop music — that’s when the change becomes something exciting, and not just because we want to say we’re chameleons all the time.”The portrait that emerges in “The Sparks Brothers” is of musicians fully dedicated to their work — even in the years when Sparks didn’t have a record deal, the Maels continued to write and record with almost monastic discipline. “I don’t think it’s especially praiseworthy that even in those periods when things around us were kind of dire, we were working on the music,” Ron said. “There isn’t an alternative; that kind of work ethic is all that there is. At this point, we have an excuse and we could say we’re too old, but that’s a part of our DNA.”Wright said this example of artistic commitment beyond the pursuit of commercial success is the true intention of the film. “I hope that for people with creative ambitions, the lesson that comes out is to stay true to your beliefs, because really it’s about the persistence of vision,” he said. “Especially in this climate when musicians are having the hardest time they’ve ever had, I hope the documentary shows a way to do it.”Meanwhile, the Mael brothers have not slowed down. Last year, their album “A Steady Drip, Drip, Drip” became their fourth British Top 10 entry, and they plan to tour the United States, Europe and Japan in early 2022, alongside the release of a new album. They have a “very brash” sequel to “Annette” they will be pitching during the Cannes festival, and still hope to make an animated film of their 2010 radio musical, “The Seduction of Ingmar Bergman.”The experience of “The Sparks Brothers” has given the perpetually evolving Sparks a different attitude about revisiting their life’s work.“We’ve always said that we dispose of everything immediately after the moment,” Ron said. “But with this specific representation, we have to admit that perhaps some of those judgments were wrong. This way of presenting our legacy is the one way we want to be remembered.” More

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      in Movies

      Sparks, a Musical Curiosity With a Big Following for Half a Century

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      Edward Wright knows Sparks and you will too, once you see his documentary about this singular cultural phenomenon.Sparks, the musical entity invented and fronted by Ron and Russell Mael, is sometimes rock, sometimes pop, sometimes art song, always idiosyncratic. They’re a cult band with an ever-renewing cult and a career that spans 50 years. “The Sparks Brothers,” an energetic documentary directed by Edgar Wright, explains their appeal in part by emphasizing how it cannot be explained.Sparks’s image is one of contrasts. In the 1970s, the lead singer Russell’s slim physique, bouncy hair and matinee-idol face made him prime rock star “snack” material. Hunched over a keyboard was Ron, the songwriting brother, spindly and pale, whose mustache has been described as uncomfortably poised between Charlie Chaplin’s and Hitler’s. Then there’s what came out of Russell’s mouth — an arch falsetto that might cause a dog to wince, singing ditties about Albert Einstein and breast milk (not in the same song), over precision-tooled guitar riffs and baroque song structures that evoked both Bach and a calliope.“I thought they didn’t really exist,” the musician Nick Heyward says, recounting his surprise when he saw them on the street. “The Sparks Brothers” humanizes the two, who, despite their Euro-vibe were raised in California. Russell was a high-school quarterback, even. Their adored father, an artist, instilled a love of both film and music in the boys. He died when Ron was 11 and Russell 8.Wright, the virtuoso director of “Shaun of the Dead” and “Baby Driver,” among others, and an ace soundtrack assembler, is uniquely suited to make this tribute. Both director and band revel in formal play. Their eccentricity doesn’t entirely shut out earnestness.About sex, the brothers keep relatively mum, although when the subject of Russell’s short-lived romance with his musical collaborator Jane Wiedlin of the Go-Go’s comes up, there’s a bit of mutual humble-bragging by the still-friendly exes. As for drugs, they kept away. Rock ’n’ roll motivated them initially, but it’s something they now have an arm’s-length relationship with, in part because in its purest form it is not entirely hospitable to Sparks’s particular brand of irony.Does the movie slather on the contemporary celebrity love a little too thickly? Maybe. But even the contributions from arguable wild cards — Jason Schwartzman, Amy Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino, Neil Gaiman — are pertinent.The Sparks BrothersRated R, inexplicably. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes. In theaters. More