Carax takes his no-holds-barred examination of cinema in Holy Motors and expands it to examine the way the entertainment industry treats both aging performers and nascent talent. The result is emotionally raw and powerful, and it culminates in a heartbreaking final scene that could arguably be Adam Driver’s best acting ever. In some ways, Annette is A Star Is Born by way of last year’s Showbiz Kids, with a bit of Edgar Allan Poe sprinkled on top. Annette is blessed (or cursed) with her mother’s magical adult singing voice, and soon finds herself being puppeteered by Henry, who takes managing her child’s prodigious talents as an opportunity to avoid dealing with the decline in his career.
#Fake rock opera singer movie
This is how the titular Annette comes to the world, a literal puppet baby that’s creepy enough to join the great pantheon of creepy movie babies presided by American Sniper‘s CGI baby and Twilight: Breaking Dawn‘s monstrosity of a child. Starring: Adam Driver, Marion Cotillard, Simon Helberg, Devyn McDowell, Angèle Written by: Ron Mael, Russell Mael, Leos Carax Soon, Ann is pregnant and invaded with rumors or dreams about Henry being cancelled for his aggressive machismo and rather violent tendencies. Their love is as passionate as it is nonsensical, as the song Henry sings while going down on Ann eloquently explains. He is also engaged to his polar opposite, the angelic and pure opera singer Ann (Marion Cotillard, in a rather muted performance) who dies every night on the stage before taking a bow. The film follows Henry McHenry (Adam Driver), a Bill Burr-style bad boy comedian who liked to shock audiences with cringe self-deprecating jokes about how much life sucks, and when that and the chorus that indicates the audience when to laugh don’t work, he just fakes a shooting that fake-kills him, which somehow always does the trick. It becomes clear Annette will be a divisive film from the moment Carax opens it via voice-over narration to instruct audiences to hold their breath for the entire runtime, before we see him, his daughter, Sparks, and the entire main cast walk out of a recording studio and into the streets of Los Angeles while singing a song about starting the show. This is a film that is as overindulgent as it is earnest, but flaws and all, it is worth the wait. Whether you are already familiar with both or you just got to know about Sparks thanks to Edgar Wright’s The Sparks Brothers documentary, Annette is everything you’d imagine from a collaboration between Sparks and Carax, for better and worse. What happens when you take Leos Carax’s poetic style and emotionally raw storytelling and mix it with Spark’s multi-layered and kind of esoteric pop songwriting? Annette, of course.
#Fake rock opera singer driver
Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard star in Annette, directed by Leos Carax.