A rock opera by one of the most mysterious filmmakers of today.
The birth of a uniquely gifted child turns the successful lives of a stand-up comedian (Adam Driver) and an opera singer (Marion Cotillard) upside down. The most expensive production by Leos Carax—and his first work in the past ten years—opened the Cannes Film Festival in 2021 and won the award for Best Director.
Although nominally Annette is Leos Carax’s first musical film, elements of the genre have occurred in his Pola X (1999) scored by avant-garde composer Scott Walker and in Holy Motors (2012), which starred Kylie Minogue. Music has always played a major part in Carax’s work—remember the iconic and forever quoted run by the filmmaker’s alter ego Denis Lavant to David Bowie's Modern Love in The Night Is Young (1986). In his new feature, however, Carax steps onto new territory in collaboration with the eccentric brothers Ron and Russell Mael of Sparks, who were featured in the recent biopic by Edgar Wright and wrote the music and the screenplay for Annette.
A dedicated dreamer, even when he touches on serious social issues such as AIDS (The Night Is Young) and homelessness (Les Amants du Pont-Neuf), Carax is always primarily focused on the theme of hopeless affection. The tragic and irresistible leads in the new feature are the Oscar-nominated Adam Driver (Marriage Story) and the Oscar-winning Marion Cotillard (Two Days, One Night). The mad world of Annette, where the border between reality and fantasy is dangerously fragile, has been filmed by a winner of César, cinematographer Caroline Champetier, who previously collaborated with Carax on the short Merde (2002) and Holy Motors (2012).
The film will be screened in English and French with Russian subtitles.
Annette
Director: Leos Carax
France, Germany, Belgium, 2021, 139 min. 16+