Wind back to the opening of Leos Carax’s first feature, “Boy Meets Girl” to “Annette,” Carax has stuck to his story: boy meets girl, and the meeting sends them down into the depths.
“Annette” is steeped in their trademark blend of the soaring and the staccato, and they appear at the outset, chanting “So May We Start” in a recording studio and leading a cavalcade of singers out onto the streets of Los Angeles.
Yet what ensues is a melodrama of such peculiar fervor that we somehow feel we ought to take it seriously; I kept smothering guilty laughs, as one does when reading the surtitles during productions of Puccini.
At the age of six or so, she gives her farewell concert, borne aloft into a stadium by a quartet of drones, with Henry, her anxious Prospero, looking on.
I don’t believe that police cars fly around L.A., as they do in “Blade Runner” , that the hero should return, at the close of a working day, to a family of chimps; yet the welcome he receives is touching and true.
Still, no Driver film should be ignored, and, with Cotillard strangely adrift from the action, he slings himself into the unsavory role of the hero and almost saves “Annette.” Onstage, as a comic, Henry is snappish, thickly maned, and jittery with discontent, pacing around like a lion suffering from cage rage.
If there is nothing in “Annette”—which is dedicated to Stephen Sondheim, among others—quite as overwhelming as Driver’s roaring rendition of Sondheim’s “Being Alive” in “Marriage Story” , that is hardly the fault of the leading man, and it’s worth sticking with Carax’s film for the sake of its no-frills final scene.
“Ema,” a new film by Pablo Larraín, presents us with another unhappy couple, with another unusual child, who thrash out their riven relationship for our delight.
The troupe’s routines are like mass pulsations, and given that Larraín’s film is prone to erotic surges, involving two or more persons, it can be hard to establish where the dancing leaves off and the sex begins.
Yet that’s the deal, and her crafty schemes, which eat up the bulk of the story, entail her becoming Polo’s teacher and seducing both of his new adoptive parents: Raquel , a firefighter, who teaches her to use his mighty hose.
Raquel asks to be paid for her services with “a hundred haircuts and three hundred manicures”; Ema offers to reimburse her in dance, and then, in a generous gesture, takes her along to an orgy—“delicious but very dirty.” If such means of remittance were embraced as standard legal practice, what a wonderful world this would be.
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