This year's Cannes Film Festival's main competition unit list saw Leo Carax's new film "Annette" listed in it, which is indeed a pleasant surprise to movie fans. This is still a paranoid author's film, dismantling and twisting musicals and musicals into a new one. It has already announced the opening of the next wonderful performance.
To simply regard "Annette" as a musical, it would be too big and too much to look down on Karax. The film continues the director's long-standing beating and reconstruction of reality and fiction. In the long-shot follow-up, a group of people sang and rushed from the studio to the street, starting with the line "Can we start?", reminding all staring eyes that this is an overlapping of virtual and real, and also Fantasy and real text.
At the end of the long shot, the male protagonist Henry and the female protagonist An and the two men and women parted ways, went their separate ways, performed alone on their respective stages, met in "reality", and were isolated on the stage. The audience in front of the screen, the content points to each other's love and hatred, life and death entanglement.
Henry is a stand-up and stage comedian. He looks like an angry boxer. He is not stingy, irritable, and sometimes has bipolar tendencies. He often throws the microphone and rolls on the stage to offend the audience. He said I sympathize with him. The abyss, but dare not throw into the abyss, is clearly a person with a dark heart, a self-destruction complex, and a soul parasitic in the abyss. He kept asking himself and the audience, "Why should I become a comedian?"
Ann is a soprano singer with a fairy spirit like a forest goddess. During a performance, she walked from the stage set to the real forest in the backstage, and then turned back, approaching a surreal dream, breaking the stage space and The barrier of the real space, the director freely connected the stage play and the real scene of the drama.
In terms of production scale, "Annette" is the film with the largest investment and the strongest cast since Leo Carax started filming. As a pure-bred French director, he has been concentrating on shooting pure French films before, and rarely walks out. In Europe, going to Hollywood this time is a new attempt in the director's career, and within the established framework, he also had a great time.
"Annette" is an English-language film, and Leo Karax has a certain compromise in business. The heroine chose the Oscar-winning actress and the famous French star Marion Cotillard, and the hero is Adam Driver. This combination is quite meaningful. Adam's restraint and outburst, peace and distortion in his performance were all unforgettable. It is not ruled out that the director watched Jarmusch's "Patterson" and Noah Baumbach's "Marriage Story" before focusing on it. he.
Karax may be trying to get closer to the mainstream and make a lot of money in the North American market, such as giving up writing his own script and writing it by the Mel brothers of the Sparks. The whole story of "Annette" takes place in Los Angeles, which is the card. Lax's unfamiliar place, and he inspired him with different inspirations, he insisted on authorship to the greatest extent, and making a musical in the traditional sense was not his pursuit.
About halfway through, you will find that what the film wants to convey is that the world that photography travels through is a natural stage, fiction and reality are the inside and outside of each other, lies and truth are mirror images of each other, and they can be dismantled on and off the stage, not only the camera will deceive people. , the eyes sometimes deceive people, the audience only needs to feel it, not necessarily to fully understand the plot.
Compared with other works, "Annette" is not very Karax, it is lively, noisy, emotional and colorful, not so concise, indifferent, alienated, and its reliance on special effects and animation is more than ever, the dense lines suggest In the blank plot, many stories were sung. For example, Henry told the process of killing his wife on stage, which was like a performance. It was a prank, not a real case.
Whenever the story takes a turning point, it is presented in the form of inserting entertainment news to alienate the audience from the atmosphere of the musical. This kind of gameplay is very cartoon-like in American movies. The skillful use of these traditional techniques and the contradictory narratives are very Carrax. Swinging between American musicals and European literary films, Karax will not lose himself, he has his own solid language, and no one can change him.
French musicals became world famous in the 1960s from Jacques Demy's "Lola", "The Umbrella of Cherbourg" and "Liu Mei Hua Jiao". Although French musicals have never been able to compete with American musicals, even Alain Resnais has The master of the film also filmed "No Mouth to Mouth", and a rising star like François Aujong also filmed "Eight Beauties". Karax's "Annette" is different from any musicals of his predecessors and peers. He is like a half-autistic patient who is isolated from the world, indulging in his own world, and it doesn't matter if he has a mixed reputation. In short, "Annette" is a A one-of-a-kind Karax-style film.
As we all know, Karax is not a prolific director. Apart from short films and collections, he has only made two feature films, "Sacred Car Dealer" and "Annette" in the 21st century. Every ten years, two feature films come out. Later, the pace of filming slowed down, coupled with the low-key and mysterious behavior, there is often a feeling that the director is estimated to quit the film circle. A few years ago, I watched his early "Boys and Girls" and "Bad Blood" at the Broadway French Film Festival. Sitting in a small audience, staring at the big screen with trance-like picture quality, it was like thinking about a genius who has passed away. So watching "Annette" has a kind of stubborn and cherished sadness.
Since his debut, the only person who has grown up with Karax is the eccentric-looking Denis Lawan. He is almost the queen of Karax's leading actor. Now the two "bad boys" are 60 years old, but their temperament has not changed. In the director's last film "Holy Car Dealer", he was the only protagonist, an "inhuman" who kept changing clothes and sneaking into life, but unfortunately he no longer appeared in "Annette". Part of the producer's business considerations, but a disappointment to the director's die-hard fans.
In the 1980s, Carax was regarded as Godard's heir by the "Cinemabook" and other media. In a documentary "Mr. X" made for him, Godard, who was interviewed in the film, said conservatively "I hope he is braver" when commenting on his "non-legal" heir.
In a sense, "Annette" is indeed a brave work. The director stepped out of the comfort zone of French-language films and completed the film with American filmmakers, musicians and even Japanese actors, heading for a larger market and more There is a vast crowd, and the director has not changed his mind in essence, and is still sticking to his own image style and obsession with movies.
According to the "MacGuffin" principle of Hollywood drama films, "Annette" as the title is the soul of the whole movie. So, what exactly is "Annette"? Explicitly Henry and Ann's daughter? But this child is like a puppet, like a computer-generated dummy, an absurd prop, a joke-like avatar. Ann seems to have become a banshee after her death, and Annette's birth, inherited Ann's genes, became a singer at a young age, toured the world, and the crowd was very lively.
Annette's birth process indicates that this is an absurd symbol. It is true that when the title "Annette" with a strong contrast between light and dark appears, it has a fairy tale color, but it is also an illusion that is difficult to justify. This maintains Henry and Ann, Children who attract the world's attention are symbols of a digital age, embellishments of popular culture and popular life. It was not until the end of the film, in the scene of visiting prison in prison, that the child changed from a puppet to a real person, both true and false, sometimes false and true, inaction and nonexistence, both like a fable and an irony.
Annette, a child who may not exist, is like an illusion created by a hypnotist, drawing the fate of Henry and Ann, and attracting the eyes of all audiences on and off the screen. This is the magic of Karax.
Henry is performing a one-man comedy on the stage, ridiculing, roaring, lyrical, questioning, and constantly teasing the audience under the stage to create boiling points. Karax is also teasing the audience through the film. Can you form a "synesthesia" with him? "To get excited together, just look at personal creation. As a movie fan, I certainly hope that Karax will continue to let go and perform on the big screen, and go further and further.
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