"Annette" is a post-modern musical full of metaphors and imagination. It is a subversion of tradition and an exploration of film noumenon within the framework of musical genres, while possessing typical meta-film characteristics. In the opening, the director and production team gathered in the recording studio, and the appearance of modern recording equipment followed an ancient mechanical voice. Karax faces the present and future of cinema with a nostalgic attitude, bringing us a complex and pure audio-visual feast with rich expressions and sound experiments.
What is a musical? Or, let us ask Bazin's sentence pattern: What is a musical? It's probably the most phony deception of all the genre, the ultimate form of cinematic hallucination, utopia. It keeps us away from all the trivial troubles in life. In Howard Hawks' "A Gentleman Prefers Beauty", the two heroines come to a foreign land and have nowhere to live, and in the blink of an eye they are singing and dancing on the streets of Paris. This seemingly unreal and surreal scene reveals the film's theme with the irony of the lyrics - a play on the relationship between men and women. Every song and dance sequence in a musical is an instant reflection of the mood or situation in the film, and Annette is no exception. The movie starts with everyone singing "Can we start"; Henry and Ann fall in love and they sing "We love each other so much". In the eager calling and affectionate gaze of the characters, we find that the film at this time does not need any superfluous interpretation, it shows itself sincerely in the unity of the signifier and the signified.
Behind this self-evidence that needs no explanation is the glory of Hollywood in the golden age. The traditional musicals represented by "Singing in the Rain" satisfy the audience's yearning and needs for innocence and beauty, while "La La Land" a few decades later brings We relive this feeling. "Annette" seems to follow Hollywood's history of effects, but it quickly ends this short-lived romance with a dark tone - the audience's difference in attitudes towards Henry and Ann spawns the seeds of evil that lead Henry to wife-killing road. In the process, outside doubts not only drowned out Henry's stage, but also spread through modern media. As a result, the appearance of the news screen satisfies the entertainment psychology of the public. At the same time, it eliminates the presence of industrial machines with its daily attributes, and realizes the rebellion against Hollywood's dream machine.
It needs to be clear that the film is by no means a complete denial of the history of musicals, but a fusion of horizons of traditional Hollywood stories in a postmodern context. The romantic or serious things that we are familiar with are combined in an unfamiliar way, but in the end they belong to two systems: the film and the idea of the film. And here at Karax, the movie is speed. Whether it's Denis Lawan's galloping run in "Lovers in New Bridge" and "Sacred Motorcycle," or Adam Driver's motorbike galloping through the night, they all demonstrate the speed of cinema, as it was when it was born. At the beginning, the rotation of the film determines everything. The role of song and dance is to provide it with an acceleration, which is the original concept of song and dance.
In naturalistic song and dance scenes, this speed is the dance of the actors following the rhythm, which is transmitted directly from the camera to the audience. But in such a post-set musical, the actors are no longer just actors, but actors of actors or actors of writers. The stage is not just an actual stage like in Cassavetes and Ryusuke Hamaguchi's films, any formalistic setting, such as the storm and desert island in the movie, can be regarded as a stage. The stage, a space surrounded by cables, is a testament to the fact that our entity is still in the age of electricity. In "Twin Peaks", David Lynch made Cooper, who has been lost for many years, go home from the power outlet, and the stage full of wires naturally becomes a hub connecting different dimensions like the red room. The fusion in the film also emphasizes a space-time relationship, Henry and Ann, two stages, like the center of two multiverses, whose collision is destined to cause chaos. Inside the stage, the actor's body, as the embodiment of the director's intention and the audience's appeal, seems to be the absolute protagonist who dominates the stage. However, the stage is not just an object or a passive conductive container. Who can say that the car in "Sacred Car Dealer" is not the protagonist as important as Mr. Oscar? Unlike Cronenberg's "Desire Express" which sees the car as an extension of the human body and desire, in Karax's film the car or the stage and the human are fundamentally opposed. Whereas the mobility of the car mirrors the constraints of being in it, the stage is the opposite; Oscar is in the car constantly preparing for the next performance, which is the public performance on the stage. The former is like a rehearsal of the latter. Karax's perspective has changed from private to open, from self-rehearsal to the whole audience. But the common denominator is that acting is always a job, and it inevitably leads to alienation—a split between roles for the same actor, or a split between a talk-show actor and an opera actor.
In such a naked contradiction, the actor's actor or the author's actor is abstracted as a symbol. And this symbol also points to the incompleteness of the film's signifier. In this musical film, "song" and "dance" are broken, and An elegant singing cannot match any dance, so where is there really "dance"? Perhaps only Henry's exaggerated bodily movements can be seen as an eerie, rhythmic dance. Ann saves the audience by dedicating herself to the stage over and over again in holy chant, while Henry keeps attacking the audience with his frantic performances. In fact, Henry and Ann's relationship contains a kind of intersubjectivity. Sartre pointed out: "The essence of the relationship between consciousness is not co-existence, but conflict." Henry's image of arrogance and brutality is self-evident when he shows his teeth, and no matter how he changes the character of his experience, it is not difficult for the audience to recognize it. His typical meaning: Henry, a vain artist, the epitome of patriarchal society.
But in Henry's arrogant back, we also catch a glimpse of the loss of author-centrism. Ann's dedication is not worthy of praise, even in Henry's eyes a disgusting show. Ann asked Henry, "Is there anything else sacred to you?" The latter's way of dismantling the former's myth is blasphemous. Nietzsche wrote in "Thus Spoke Zarathustra": "I have recently heard the devil say this: 'God is dead; God is dead in his sympathy for the world.'" It is a kind of sympathy and consolation. She is willing to become a puppet of singing and sacrifice herself to the applause of the audience. The bow after "death" exposes the hypocritical nature of art; when Henry suspended his death on the stage, the audience was in chaos and screaming, and the audience cheers again after he rises and bows, proclaiming the author's supremacy over the stage with his resurrection. Henry's irony is a critique of all sympathizers who pretend to be God, but he's not superhuman either. His increasingly frenzied words and deeds caused him to lose his audience (believers) and become a dictator due to greed and desire.
After Ann's death, her ghost kept wandering around Henry. And their child, Annette, a puppet, suddenly starts singing like her mother. Henry, like a tyrant of a new age, was tormented by the ghost of history, so he had to kill the conductor who represented the past. After Annette announced her father's crime, everyone scolded Henry in anger, but at the same time they asked: "Who will replace Ann? Who will die for us?" Yes, compared to a wicked man on trial, They would rather see a perfect victim. On stage or in reality, the death of God is always more powerful than the death of the devil. Henry and Ann can't decide their respective fates, because the audience has already given the answer. Others are hell, and the audience is the abyss. "When I look into the abyss, the dark abyss, I hear my own death knell ringing." Annette, who was freed from patriarchal control, eventually turned from a puppet to a living person: "I will never sing again." She waved goodbye, Get away from us. At this time, the artwork is also separated from the author, separated from the audience, and entered into its own existence. And the puppet remains in place, reminding us of the evidence that she had been there.
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