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.
“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 , a performance artist and an operatic soprano whose marriage is catnip for the tabloid media.
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 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.
He is the star and author of “The Ape of God,” a one-man show 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.
Is he an internal critic of toxic masculinity or an exceptionally magnetic example of it? That may be a distinction without a difference.
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.
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.
Driver, some of whose best roles to date have been as troubled men of the theater , doesn’t waste energy in trying to make Henry likable or in overselling his villainy.
A work of art propelled by a skepticism about where art comes from and why we value it the way we do.