It’s been a good summer for Sparks. The complicated career of the musical duo, singer Russell Mael and keyboardist Ron Mae, was clarified, in many of its twisting turns by the documentary The Sparks Brothers. Now comes Annette, the duo’s musical, developed with French director Leos Carax and starring Adam Driver as bad-boy comedian Henry McHenry and Marion Cotillard as opera soprano Ann Defransnoux.
One of The Sparks Brothers’ revelations was that as students in the ‘60s, the Maels shot a loving spoof of a French new wave film. With Annette, they work with a younger director influenced by Jean-Luc Goddard and other long-ago cinematic provocateurs. Sparks perform as Annette begins—Russell older yet still hitting operatic high notes; and Ron, solemn as a statue behind his piano, his trademark Hitler mustache trimmed to a more respectable configuration. In a bravura tracking shot, Sparks and companions leave the stage, advance along winding hallways and onto the street outside the concert hall, singing on the way and finally proclaiming: “Ladies and gentlemen, shut up and sit.”
In other words, let the “real” show begin.
Annette is an irony-laden production with many points to make amidst its lushly quirky visuals (many scenes look better on big screens than small). It is aware of itself as fiction, and explores the artifice of art, questions the meaning of entertainment, spoofs the emotional manipulation of audiences by performers and the herd instinct of humans. The banality of celebrity culture is forefront. The paparazzis trailing Henry and Ann sing as the snap pictures and the Showbiz News show announces their marriage with a cooing jingle (“Tie the knot, Tie the knot”) as well as Ann’s pregnancy (“Newborn girl, Newborn girl”).
Not surprisingly, as Ann gives birth, the nurses sing a lively chorus of “push and push and push—that’s it!”
Henry spends much of the film’s time speeding around on his motorcycle, frowning dramatically; and Ann is ferried by limo to her performances, watching news of wildfires and catastrophe from the screen in the backseat in one of several Apocalypse Near moments. Television also becomes the forum for a chorus of Furies, women who come forward with “similar stories” of Henry, his abuse and violence. One of them even says she “fears for Ann,” singing, “She must be warned, she must be warned.”
The director, Corax, is partly successful in transforming what could as profitably have been a stage production into cinema. Unlike too many wannabe rock musicals, whose authors get their beat from Barry Manilow, Annette’s music has a dynamism and underlying tension while hitting the glass-shattering high notes for which Sparks has long been known. The eccentric film will be appreciated by their fans as another entry in their catalogue of surprises.
Annette opens in theaters on August 6.
