CINOSOPHY: a musical with a sense of Annette, director Leos Carax
Leos Carax, a rebellious French director and troublemaker, who twice won the Cannes Film Festival prize, made a film that was very unusual, even for him.
This is the musical Annette, which Сarax created in collaboration with the musical group Sparks, while the script was written by the Mael brothers, the founders of Sparks, and they also composed the music for the film.
I consider it necessary to warn that the film is not for everyone. Under the cover of a bright eccentric musical, fundamental, but at the same time very heavy, almost impossible for the human soul messages are hidden.
The Musical Annette opened the 2021 Cannes Film Festival, which is now taking place despite the pandemic. The film, starting with a bright romantic note, promises an inspiring love story, but the viewer is cruelly deceived in the end.
In short, the pivot of the plot is a fiery, at the height of passion, love story of a stand-up artist and an opera singer. It would seem that love transforms both, takes away from everything mundane and painful. But then the story moves from romance to tragedy, and then turns into a frank macabre.
It is not easy to tell about this highly unusual movie without spoilers. However, I think it is more appropriate to leave the intrigue and mention the problems that Carax’s film raises.
We are accustomed to, we are even convinced that love is the highest feeling, the only beacon for humanity (remember Dante – love that moves the sun and the stars). Сarax commits almost sacrilege – demonstrating what monstrous abysses of violence, lies and evil love can hide in itself. Moreover, it is genuine, not an imitation.
The director with anatomical clarity, step by step, reveals the mechanisms by which love kills everything that does not fit into its expectations, turns a living creature into a kind of zombie. Seeing and understanding this is excruciatingly difficult. It’s easier to turn away and remain trapped in a comforting illusion. True, its price will turn out to be excessive, incompatible with life.
Сarax turns his film to those who understand that only the truth, whatever it may be, makes a person free. A tape for those who are not afraid to look into the abyss and leave it refreshed. In the era of commercialized cinema, such films – shocking, radical, with multidimensional meaning – are in the minority.
Therefore, to anyone who treats cinema as a true, thought-provoking art, Annette’s musical will seem like a real treasure.
