Annette

This is a film that tries to kill a man to save him. Nobody can rip a man's eyes out of his head and turn them inside out like Carax. You stare into the abyss and it stares into you. For me, it is a surprisingly intimate film about pain, self-deception and fatherhood, about the illusions in which we lose ourselves, and also about the fact that film as the ultimate illusion can sometimes tear off all masks. Rationality is overrated, imagination will save the world. Or at least give it a decent funeral. (04.08.2021)

The unusual musical Annette, adapted from the stage production, is a brilliantly crafted tragic romance, both cinematically and musically, and it also works well as a sharp critique of the artificial world of show business, which leaves no room for true love. It is certainly not a movie that will appeal to the masses, but it will certainly find an audience. Fans of the band Sparks and of Adam Driver, who is here in top acting form, will be over the moon (75%) (24.03.2023)

First half absolutely captivating and gripping, then it falls a bit, but the final passage is once again splendid. Such a quirky musical hasn't been here for a long time - with absolutely divine visuals and captivating Adam Driver. For many, it will be too unconventional and exhausting, but it's not that harsh art. It was a bit of a rabbit in a hat for me, but in the end I'm very glad that I chose Annette as my return film after almost 10 months of absence from the cinema. (07.07.2021)

Neo-Baroque lost its neo and only baroque remained, whose weight of gilded encumbrance may have been another bead in the rosary of genre-ironic creations of cinéma du look, but the repetition of the prayer mantra reveals itself here as a doubly double-edged sword, which Carax cut himself with this time: by repeating the form, its true power was diluted, the power of negation through a convention-incompatible form, to such an extent that the negation of negation (= form) evoked simple mathematics - multiplying two minuses gives us a plus, which is nothing but the valorization of the content itself. And in the content, I saw nothing but convention, to which only a different narrative vector and occasionally a comedic tone could not suffice to break free from it. Symptomatically, here, the undermining and playing with genre forms (musical, melodrama, fairy tale, etc.) is nothing more than something we have already seen in other more commercial works because such "postmodernity" has long been privatized by Hollywood. Hollywood has finally caught up with and absorbed Carax like a depth that is truly dangerous to look into because, from this perspective, cinéma du look can turn into cinéma du don't look. Neo-baroque always started in apparent kitschy sweetness only to turn bitter, but this transition was (in the best works) caused precisely by the inversion of conventions of given forms, while when we want to repeat this Neo-baroque dramatic arc only on the level of content, we always end up with nothing but convention sneaking in through the back door. Perhaps the transformation of the puppet into a living being was supposed to be an interpretive indication of the author's mise en abyme, with which Carax wanted to convince the viewer at the last moment that his film is not just a bloodless marionette swallowing the budget, but a work containing life, yet even in this final attempt (which is nothing other than a replication of Hollywood desires), he failed. (09.07.2021)

Annette can be described as Carax’s Southland Tales, as it also raises great expectations that it doesn’t live up to, while presenting a distinctive and tenaciously conceptual vision that is both easy to brush off and fulfilling to interpret, and it also goes stubbornly against the grain, seeming obstinately serious while offering an inwardly atypical and subversive spectacle that, however, exposes and adores all spectacles in equal measure. If we look for parallels to Annette and delve deeper into Carax’s cinephilia, we may also arrive at Jacques Demy and his ultra-kitschy and, at the same time, subtly self-reflective and totally self-assured musicals, which looked misguided next to the New Wave of the time, though they were essentially New Wave due to their obstinate formality and artificiality. Similarly, Carax’s treatment of the screenplay by Sparks tells a story that is banal at its core; in this case, a tabloid romance from the world of show business, full of grand emotions. He presents it to us gnawed down not only to the marrow, but also to its essential theatricality, self-centred pomposity and performativity. If in Holy Motors he showed film as a medium of deception and illusion, even as he simultaneously sang their praises and elevated the nude king himself to an enchanting phoenix, in Annette he constantly presents the artificiality, unreality and lifelessness of his opera from the world of alt-pop music videos. Films that don’t give us what we want are actually in some ways the most honest and unexpectedly fascinating. (10.07.2021)