I walked out of Annette in a daze. Genuinely didn't know what to think of it. I have never struggled with a film as much as I struggled with this one.

The fact that it was a musical made it even harder. Musicals are as close to pure entertainment as you get in the arts. That's why I generally can't stand them: I find them cloying, overly polished from the compositions to the themes to the grating deliveries of their singers. About the only musical I like is Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812, and even then only the off-Broadway version, where the lead singer sounds better suited for low-fi garage rock than for the stage. But even that is geared towards being a Good Time first and foremost, whereas Annette was a whole slew of words I rarely associate with musicals.

Abrasive. Aggressive. Alienating. Antagonistic.

Annette was written by Sparks, one of my favorite bands, and directed by Leos Carax, one of my favorite directors. I described Sparks once to a partner who worked in musical theatre by saying: they're a rock band who writes musical theatre songs. If Sparks has a single limitation as a band, it's that they always lean arch, a little bit overly cerebral, in ways that they usually work with in clever ways but occasionally leave me feeling a little flat. Which is why I couldn't imagine a better partner for them than Leos Carax, whose films I'd call savagely sensual: astonishingly vivid, but with a viciousness to their sensuality, enticing like a Venus flytrap. Carax, I imagined, would take everything intellectual about Sparks and find a way to turn them brutal.

Well, he did. And Annette basically pummeled me. It didn't hurt that he cast as its lead Adam Driver, whose performance is so strange and unsettling that it knocked me on my ass in a whole nother way. I almost texted a friend after the showing: "You know the old adage about an immovable force meeting an unstoppable object? Imagine that, but it's three irreconcilable forces meeting. That's Adam Driver, Leos Carax, and Sparks."

It's odd to leave a film uncertain if you liked it; I felt like I might decide a day later that I either passionately loved or hated it, and wasn't at all sure which. Sure enough, it's a day later, and I'm pretty sure it's passionate love. But there's something to be said for a movie that leaves you reeling that hard.

I'm going to break this into three essays. Each one will tell you more about the movie; if you find yourself curious after reading it, stop there, add Annette to your schedule, and come back some other time. By the end I'll be delving into some pretty serious spoiler territory, which—depending on how you look at the film—may or may not matter. And if you don't know why you should be bothered to care about Annette, well, the only answer I can give you is this:

Annette is the most aggressively anti-Hollywood big-budget Hollywood film I've seen since Cloud Atlas and Spring Breakers came out a decade ago. And Annette makes Cloud Atlas seem compulsively accessible by comparison.

(Cloud Atlas and Spring Breakers are both great, but we'll save those for another time.)

First things first: this is more an opera than a musical. The music is used to establish tone and texture, on top of which some Acting takes place. The narrative exists in explicitly simple beat-by-beat form. Yes, the opening number is a poppy earworm where the cast begs you to let them entertain you. Don't trust it—and don't expect anything else to be as explicitly songlike across Annette's 2.5-hour runtime, or you'll be baffled and disappointed.

On top of that, Leos Carax insisted on recording actors singing during their scenes, without overdubbing and seemingly without autotune. Some of the vocals are rough. The soundtrack album is polished and gorgeous, and not what you'll get in the movie itself. This isn't just an opera, it's a rough opera, performed in large part by people who don't sing opera. (The opera numbers are gorgeous and dubbed, and may mislead you into expecting more like them. Again: don't.)

Second: this is an Adam Driver movie, far more than it is a Marion Cotillard movie. I went in expecting a movie where the two got equal room, and was increasingly disgruntled over time when they did not. Set your expectations accordingly: this is a movie about Adam Driver's (perfectly-named) Henry McHenry, and Cotillard's Ann Defrasnoux will also make some appearances. Ditto Simon Helberg as the Unnamed Accompanist. (Henry and Ann's daughter Annette plays a more peculiar part.)

Third: while I've come round to thinking that Annette is an astonishingly thoughtful and complex movie, don't expect it to wear its nuance on its surface. The surface of its telling, in fact, is aggressively flat: Henry McHenry is not a good person, his not-goodness is telegraphed from his first scene, and his inner demons are more often declared out loud than expressed conspicuously. There are certain ways in which we're accustomed to writers showing off their capacity for emotional depths and three-dimensional humanity; you will find virtually none of that here.

It is possible to walk away thinking of Ann and Annette as ciphers and of Henry as a flat-out Bad Man, the kind who We Are Tired Of Artists Making Art About. And while I would challenge that interpretation, one of the movie's many aggressions is that it won't defy your attempt to interpret it thus: in fact, it lays this interpretation at your feet, much like a cat would drop a dead mouse for you, then stares at you blankly, as if to say: So?

Here's where it's important to remember the film's writers and composers. As songwriters, Sparks fetishize shallowness: they love Californian beach himbos, blockheaded guys who can't express their feelings about women with any depth. They love repeating banal phrases, over and over again, trusting that the repetition will slowly reveal something more than you see: "My Baby's Taking Me Home" repeats the titular phrase a couple hundred times, and watches as it goes from relieved to longing to anxious to desperate to triumphant; "I Can't Believe That You Would Fall For All The Crap In This Song" repeats "I love you, and only you, and only you" so many times that, partway through, you realize the song's gone from a funny piss-take on pop songs to a story about an abusive relationship, and to the ways that our longings for Happily Ever Afters leave us open to just that kind of abuse.

In other words, it's not that Sparks are unintelligent or un-nuanced. It's that they see the masks we wear, the phrases we repeat, as revelatory. The clues to who we are are always hidden around the edges; the things that appear most obvious are the places where depth lurks, because we so take them for granted that we forget why say and do them, and forget to spot the motives and impulses and longings and fears that propel us, mechanically, into playing our parts in the puppet show.

But we're accustomed to pop songs being banal. We're less used to movies pursuing the same banality. And Sparks is certainly not operating in a pop mode here, offering the usual comfortable handholds for us to latch onto—instead, they're playing with opera, and specifically with the likes of Bertolt Brecht and Philip Glass, using shallowness as provocation, obviousness as a way to aggressively close the distance with their audience. Yes, you know what the characters are meant to be, what they symbolize; yes, the subtext is literally read out loud to you at times. What now? Why do it, if it's this blatant, this obvious, so basic that the whole story could be told in five minutes? What's the point, if you know the point from the outset?

Some conversations about art happen after the art, in conversations that begin upon reflection of a shared experience. Brecht in particular wanted to close the gap between performer and audience: the conversation about the art begins while the art is still happening, the actor engaging you even as they continue about their role. It's not just your regular "meta", where scripts are about scripts: instead, it's a script that tries to rip itself apart, tearing down the scenery to reflect the real world beyond. Why are we doing this? Why are you watching this? Is it just so that you can be entertained? If so: why is this entertaining? Are those deeper themes really all that deep, or are they just there to offer you one additional comfort, and a sense that you're somehow noble or intelligent or sensitive for consuming this particular product? On the flip side, is the idea that art is an escape, a way to retreat from your difficult life, no matter how sugary or mindless it gets, just a convenient excuse we're given, a way to convince ourselves that it's possible to draw a line between work and play, the serious and the fun, relaxation and strenuous effort? In other words: is the escape the escape, or is the escape your belief that there is an escape? Did you get away from the world because this is away from the world, or did you "get away" only in the sense that you've been permitted to delude yourself? And to the extent that you think art is "about" the world, to what extent is that a delusion too, an escape masquerading as the opposite of an escape?

The way I'd put it is, Annette is a very fun movie, but the parts you expect will be fun won't be; the fun comes up in many other innovative and delightful ways, to serve as a counterpoint to the many ways the movie sets you up with an expectation before dropping that dead mouse at your feet. Similarly, Annette is a very provocative movie, but its most obvious provocations are distractions: caricatures of provocation, lampoons of meaning, grotesque parodies of what "sensitive" and "thoughtful" art looks like. Its real thoughts are quiet, vulnerable, whispered, and they're only ever spoken beneath the loudest and most bombastic parts of the experience. The challenge is to look at something vivid and lurid and disturbing and grandiose and see something more, not "within" the luridness or "beneath" it so much as simultaneously it: the subtleties of an obvious thing, the details we forget are details, the "and" to what's so aggressively challenging us not to look for an "and" that it takes conviction to remember that first impressions don't have to be our only impressions, even if our first impressions were wholly and comprehensively correct.

On one level, the plot of Annette is this: a man loves a woman. The woman loves the man. They have a child together, and love that child. Things go wrong.

It is a love story and a tragedy, in the way that those two things so very often fit together.

On another level, Annette is about four artists, and four different kinds of artist—which is to say, four different kinds of people—and about the ways those people relate to one another.

Ann is an opera singer—a soprano. She is famous and beloved: so beautifully, delicately feminine that her specialty involves dying on-stage, betrayed or abandoned or assaulted.

Henry calls himself a stand-up comedian, but doesn't really perform stand-up. His act is an act of aggression towards his audience: he entertains them and he loathes them, and what entertains them is that he loathes them. He doesn't know another way, he tells them, to be honest with them: only if he disarms them, only if he makes them laugh, can he force the truth upon them. Is his hostility the truth, or is it the means by which he disarms, or is it both? Which part are they laughing at? Why are they laughing, if he never says anything funny? (Laugh they do, and aggressively, and at times when it doesn't seem they should be laughing.)

Ann has an accompanist, who later becomes a conductor. He loves her, and then her daughter, conspicuously and openly. It is telling that both his trades consist of working with other artists, shaping them, directing them—but not choosing that direction or that shape, only living in service to the shape that already wanted to be there.

Finally, there is Annette, who has her mother's voice.

We don't see Henry and Ann meet, or know why they fall in love, or see their relationship blossoming. The first time we meet the two of them, they're each mid-performance, and Henry's snarling at his audience about the fact of his engagement to her, the fact that he can't be bothered to perform for them thanks for his newfound love for his wife.

Ann doesn't mention Henry in her performance. She simply dies.

They love each other very much, and something is wrong. Ann's operas speak of moonless nights, love gone missing, lost in the woods. She begins to have nightmares. Henry's audience turns on him, thanks to a certain pantomime he performs of Ann. When he wraps his arms around her, it looks like he's about to strangle her. He goes to tickle her, and he looks like the start of the slasher scene in Psycho.

Annette is born. The relationship dissolves. They try to save it. It doesn't work. Annette finds her voice.

The accompanist tries to help and it doesn't help. Nobody is happy in the end.

Why are they unhappy? There are answers, but the answers are too obvious. What does it mean that Henry is upset with Ann, or that Ann is frightened of Henry? Nothing much, nothing new. The story's textures are gripping, engrossing, fascinating, but its motor? You can't make a case for it. Besides, there's a sense that things are wrong because the music says it's wrong. Put another way, their relationship is followed persistently by a celebrity gossip news show, and we often find out new developments through the show, rather than reflected by the show. The film tells us we're seeing their most intimate and private moments, but the moments, too, seem to be responses to the "news stories", people in a relationship reacting to developments in their relationship as if they were watching it on TV.

It's dissatisfying. Not the way we want the story told. Plot, we are taught, is a byproduct of motivations and consequences: somebody feels something, they act on their desires, something new ensues, somebody else feels. Here, something happens, and we don't exactly see why. And the response to whatever happens is always, jarringly, exactly what we'd expect. Why is that jarring? Because we don't need to see what they're feeling, not when we've just been told. We're given nothing new, nothing new, nothing new. We can predict every scene before it happens, because every scene is obvious. To the extent that we don't see it coming, it's because we're expecting something different, something unpredictable, something more. But how can that be, when every song tells us exactly what's happening, exactly what's coming? "I'm an accompanist," sings the accompanist, "I'm an accompanist, I'm an accompanist for Ann, for Ann." How many more times do you have to be told? "Laugh," sings the comedian. "Ha, ha," sings the audience. What does it matter that he said nothing funny? Comedians make their audiences laugh. What does it matter that the audience looks like a high school chorus from a high school musical, laughing in the most contrived and artificial way possible? This is a comedy show; they are laughing at the comedy. Don't you get it? Don't you? Don't you? Don't you?

The comedian kills; the soprano dies. He's masculine; she's feminine. We meet his audience, because he is an actor, he acts upon them, he controls them. We don't meet hers, because she is an object, she is a vessel, she is beautiful and perfect in all those ways we let women be. He is the father, stern and inaccessible and cruel; she is the girl, innocent and vulnerable, dreaming of a fairy tale princess, dreaming of a king. She is the mother, generous and giving and caring; he is the boy, lost and needy. He is the bad guy, he is the conflicted human who art allows to be conflicted; she is the victim, the cipher, defined by his need for her and his actions upon her. Men and women, am I right? "I killed them," he says of his audience. "I saved them," she says of hers. We don't need to see her audience, because he is hers. We need to see his, because she will never be his.

Annette for Dummies is just Annette. It's like an algebra equation that tells you it's an algebra equation. He loathes himself, don't you see? He's insecure, he doesn't know why she would love him, he doesn't know how to love her back. Still not subtext: he literally tells his audience all this, before you even see the two of them together. Why does she love him? We don't know, and we know he doesn't know because he tells is he doesn't know. At the same time, we do know: she loves him because she loves him, and we know she loves him because she sings about loving him. Then what's the danger? Well, the danger is that there's danger: she sees the danger, he sees the danger. There is danger. This is a tragedy because it's a tragedy. Here are all the deeper themes: you don't need to squint at them, they're flaring up like sunspots in your eyes, so deep they're banal, so clarifying that they're blinding. Is this really all there is? They don't ask themselves that, but they might as well: is this love? Is this danger? Is this tragedy?

A miracle occurs, and it's a miracle straight out of a Disney film. No, really: it's a miracle that happens exactly the way a similar miracle happens in a not-so-similar Disney film. Did I mention Ann sings at Walt Disney Concert Hall? Did I need to mention that Adam Driver was the breakout celebrity star of Disney's first Star Wars trilogy, or that Marion Cotillard won an Oscar for playing troubled celebrity singer Edith Piaf, who Sparks wrote a song about in just 2017, or that Simon Helberg was a cast member on America's Top Sitcom for over a decade? The casting can't have been that deliberate, in the same way that the movie's title was surely picked before Cotillard's casting turned it into a clever, multifaceted pun, but it would be hard to pick a set of people reflecting Pop Culture more thoroughly or deliberately than this.

You could call Annette self-indulgent, if you wanted. Maybe even self-indulgent to the cost of entertainment. But that's telling too, isn't it? To say that Annette is so busy having fun with itself, that its actors are so busy enjoying each other, that they forgot to let you enjoy it too? It's not like we don't enjoy being indulged, after all: we don't complain about gratuitous emotional manipulation, about intentional tearjerkers and too-obvious punchlines, about gasp moments that were clearly brewed in some laboratory somewhere?

It's hard to tell the difference, sometimes, between "popular" movies whose critical acclaim comes from an appreciation of technical mastery, and "critically acclaimed" movies whose popularity comes from how immediately accessible all their purportedly delicate artistry is. Hard to draw the line between the Disney factory, which more-or-less retconned Rian Johnson's attempt to make Star Wars interesting in favor of more technical gloss, and "personal projects" like Jojo Rabbit, directed by a man who'd directed for Marvel before, which addressed complex themes like "boy realizes Nazis bad" using emotionally evocative storytelling like "boy mother dies" and unusual artistic devices like "man says funny things."

That movie was plenty indulgent, right? Ah, but it set out to indulge us, and that makes it good. And if Annette failed to please us, that was clearly a technical failing, no matter how masterfully and inventively it approaches every scene, how brilliant each of its performers are, how lush and immersive its staging is, how meticulously it crafts its script. We, the audience, know when a movie has failed us. We know when art is banal, when themes are derivative or too reductive towards women or too sympathetic towards men. And if the movie practically comes out and tells us all these things, well, isn't that just a failing on the movie's part? Wouldn't a better movie simply have, well, not done that? Isn't it just some faffy artsy circle-jerkery for a movie not to give us what we want?

Ah: but I mentioned a miracle. And perhaps we should talk about that, though now is really your last chance to take a deep breath, stop reading, and give this movie a chance for yourself. Certainly by now you're well-prepared. But you might want to sit down for this last one.

Henry McHenry hates his audience. Hates. Hates hates hates.

"I hate you," he more-or-less says, and his audience laughs along. Even though there's really nothing funny there. (Leos Carax admits, in an interview, that Henry's act isn't funny—though it's not really an admission when it clearly as intended.)

My favorite negative review of Annette, from a reviewer I like a lot, is Richard Brody's, whose theory of Annette's "failure" revolves around Adam Driver. In short: Leos Carax is too intimidated by Driver's star power to make his genius fit the movie the way it should've, and, on top of that, Driver isn't funny.

"Being funny is the equivalent of being able to sing, except that, with funniness, with an actor hasn't got it, it's impossible to dub someone else's sense of humor onto the soundtrack." (Isn't that a fun line?) "What he achieves, though impressive, isn't comedy; instead, he merely signifies comedy."

"Signifies" is a great word here, and one that Brody doesn't unpack enough. In semiotics, the "signifier" expresses, and the "signified" is the abstract concept of the thing being expressed. If the signifier isn't real—if it's just the idea of something—then it's a symbol: literally, something which only exists to convey a thing. So Brody's arguing that Driver, rather than being a comedian, symbolizes one: he is The Comedian, a prop for the show, a variable in an equation. And Adam Driver fails to push beyond this because, well, he isn't funny.

It's weird to call Adam Driver not-funny. His breakout role, as Adam Sackler on Girls, was a breakout role for a reason: he was very funny, and all the funnier because Adam Sackler is a brooding, hostile kind of man who takes himself very seriously. Driver cut his teeth being funny while playing angry—exactly the kind of task, Brody charges, that Driver is constitutionally incapable of, as demonstrated through Annette.

It's easy to see why Henry McHenry's show can be a turn-off. It's the first real scene we get of the movie, and I, too, found it grating. The audience's laughter does not feel earned; it's not that the jokes don't land, it's that the jokes aren't there. It's easy to see the routine as a failed attempt at writing a genuine comedy show; failing that, it's easy to see it as a smug, self-referential bit, the byproduct of people who are so busy impressed with their own intelligence that they can't be bothered to genuinely entertain. (The latter, incidentally, is a charge that Sparks has been dealing with for a full half-century: Robert Christgau, a famous music critic who you either find incredibly real or incredibly pretentious, described Talking Heads' first album by saying that they were "like Sparks" in that they were "spoiled kids", but "without the callowness or adolescent misogyny".)

But you'll have to forgive me if I think both accusations fall somewhat short. If the goal was to write a comedy show, why would Carax dwell on long moments of menace, and why would Driver snarl-mumble all his words? If the goal, instead, was to sneeringly comment on the banality of "entertainment", as we know pretentious artsy hipsters love to do, then why depict something so hostile to the notion of entertainment? Why not portray Henry McHenry as a lowest-common-denominator sort of entertainer, feeding his audiences slop while not-so-secretly despising them? In the great Adaptation, in which Charlie Kaufman lampoons precisely this kind of pretentious anti-entertainment, his foil—imaginary twin brother Don Kaufman—giddily imagines action movies and tragic deaths and pop songs playing over credits. Why wouldn't Henry be doing that, if the goal was to portray him as a comedian?

There is very little criticism, meanwhile, of Cotillard's opera performances. Unlike Henry's show, what we see of her opera is genuinely enchanting: the melody is haunting, the words evocative, and the set design—both the parts that feel like a genuine set and the parts that seem to depart the stage entirely—is absolutely striking. Instead, the criticism of Cotillard tends to be that there's not enough of her: she's wasted in this movie, she's too slight of a figure, she recedes while Henry expands. But no time is spent dwelling on the fact that, while Henry's act "falls flat", Ann's is virtually beyond reproach. It's almost like this team knows how to make a compelling movie.

Like I said earlier, it's telling that we don't see Ann's audience. We are her audience; we don't need shots of her audience reacting to her, because we don't need to be told how to react. Her performance is for us. Her singing, her deaths, are for everybody. She is selfless—at least, seen in one light. In another light, she is solely and radiantly a kind of self, reaching deep into herself to find melody and beauty, to the point that we respond to her. All that she needs in order to give us something is to be herself, and if she is lost in herself to the point that she doesn't even see our faces, it doesn't keep us from getting her and having her exactly the way we want her. The ones we do see are Henry, who races across town to catch her act from backstage, and her accompanist, who loves her so dearly that he'll devote his life to her art, rather than to his—a gesture that will reflect several times over, as the show goes on.

Let's return to Henry's act, which we see twice: once when he kills, and once when he dies. The core of his act, in both cases, is that he doesn't want to perform, that he hates his contract and hates his audience, that he despises not only that they laugh but that he needs them to laugh—because if they don't laugh, he can't tell them anything true.

In both shows, he talks about his wife. In both shows, he mentions despising, not her, but himself: he genuinely can't see what she sees in him, and oddly, that's relatable, because on its face we can't see what she sees in him either. But we're inclined to blame the movie for this, rather than note the curious fact that Henry himself is articulating how we feel about him, on stage, in front of a conspicuous audience that isn't us.

Why does the audience laugh? Perhaps, if that's not an easy question to find the "right" answer to, we also need to ask: why, in the second act, do they stop laughing?

In the aria we see Ann sing, she is worried that the man she's singing of—and to—is dangerous and strange to her:

Later, "out of character", she sings a fairy tale about herself: "There was a girl from the middle of nowhere[...] but she didn't want to be there at all[...] Hour after hour she would struggle, till her voice became her royal realm."

That last line, "moth to a flame", echos a warning she was given in a nightmare, in which six women accuse Henry of undescribed "abuses" and "violence", and claim to be speaking out out of fear for Ann, who "quickly became a moth to a flame." It's left ambiguous whether that dream was just a dream or a depiction of actual events, but either way it speaks to the same thing all of Ann's songs speak to: she is afraid of this man who she loves.

Why is she afraid of him? That's another wrong question, but it's wrong for the opposite reasons: in this case, she's afraid because she's right to be afraid. Instead, perhaps the right question is: why does she love Henry to begin with?

Henry doesn't know. That's the point: he doesn't know. Ann knows, but she doesn't tell: all she'll say is that she loves him. Henry doesn't tell us why he loves her, but—as he says himself—he doesn't need to. We know without him telling us. In a strange way, if we look to Henry as a cipher—why does Ann love him?—we also have to see Ann as a cipher, because her motives are as unclear as Henry's allure. Similarly, if it's a mystery why Henry's audience laughs—and why they stop laughing—we have to examine, not just Henry's show, but Henry's audience. Why are they here, and what makes them leave?

The two ciphers hold two keys to unlocking Henry and his act, and—perhaps—to the question of why Sparks and Carax and Driver and Cotillard wanted to make an opera about him. But the third key is held by Henry McHenry itself. We are not the only ones asking these questions: he's asking them alongside us. In a sense, Annette is the story of his looking for the answers, as his world falls apart—entirely due to his own actions, of course. But that's just it: of course his actions tear his world apart, of course he ruins everything, of course he's awful in many ways at once. None of that is a mystery, to us or to him. What perplexes him is: why does she love him? What does he have in him that deserves that love? Why does he gain his audience, and why does he lose it? Why was he ever put in this position, to be a famous man who wrecks a famous woman's life, and why, despite her love for him and his for her, does it all go so horrifyingly wrong?

It starts with his audience. Henry McHenry, I may have mentioned, hates his audience. And his audience loves him because he hates them, just as the celebrity tabloids love him because he won't pose for their pictures, because he dons a motorcycle helmet before kissing his celebrity fiancée, because he is explicitly and aggressively not for their consumption, save for the inescapable fact that, despite the posturing, that's all he is.

He complains about the smoke they blast on stage before he enters. They laugh, because they know the smoke is part of the show, as is his complaint. He snarls that he doesn't want to entertain them—and they laugh, because entertaining them is all he's there to do. He bills himself as "the ape of God": a crude subhuman, eating bananas before his show, donning a boxing robe and throwing punches at the mirror, waving his contract before the audience like he wants to rip it to shreds. The audience laughs, because in his show, they know that they're the God he means.

So what if he hates them? So what? He's still theirs. Sure, they laugh on cue, as he glowers at them. Why wouldn't they laugh? They're not the dancing monkeys here. He is. He's famous, because they created him. And they made him, crudely, in their image. The crudeness, here, is not that he entertains them: it's that he harbors notions of being more than an entertainer, more than a consumable good. The hatred, the snarling, the refusals to perform... that's what makes him so animalistic and savage in their eyes. Their laughter comes from the knowledge that he's trapped inside their cage—and in that light, it's not thoughtless laughter, it's sophisticated. Several critics have suggested that the audience is depicted as masochistic, for laughing at his insults of them—and they're dead wrong. The audience are the sadists. They're laughing because they love how deeply Henry hates himself.

Look to Ann, whom they implicitly love. All she does is die for them, night after night, without questioning or complaining. This is what it means to be heavenly, to be divine: they consume her utterly. In dying, she claims, she saves them—perhaps because she gives them what they need. What they want is Henry's self-loathing; what completes them is Ann's tragic immolation.

And if Ann is a cipher, at least she tells us this: she sees what she does as a kind of salvation, not of herself but of others. This is her beauty; this is why men are drawn to her like "a moth to a flame". Her singing is what refines her from being "plain and plump", but her melody, invariably, is tragedy. And her tragedy, in a sense, is one of devotion: she offers the one she loves her love, her faith, and, ultimately, her life.

Why does Ann love Henry? To save him. Why does Henry hate himself? Because he doesn't know why Ann loves him. What does Ann give both him and her audience? Herself. What can Henry give his audience, but not his dearly beloved? His hatred. And why, at last, does he hate them? Because they feed on him—and because he only understands himself as a creature to be caged and consumed against his will.

The love he knows is parasitic—up until he meets Ann. Ann, to whom he can give nothing—because he only knows how to give himself to parasites. What he gives to them is his pain—and he hurts because they consume him, and they consume him because he hurts. It's a closed loop that he can understand. But with Ann, he meets someone who gives him something, and robs him of the only thing he knows how to give back.

"Loving her is making me sick," he says, in the second show—the one where either he burns his audience to the ground, or they burn him down.

Ann's accompanist loves her. He dreams of conducting—of being a symbiotic part of his relationship with her, rather than just the technical expertise that gives her form—but is relationship is born of love. That illustrates something about him, but it says something about her, too: that hers is the kind of art that seeks genuine partnership. Henry's act, meanwhile, is supported by four backup singers, but they have no interiority of their own: he uses them, not only as props, but as a kind of weapon against his audience. Here is the entertainment! Laugh! And they laugh, too, albeit in song: they're no different from his audience. They, too, are just there to do as they're told. But he uses them because he needs to use them; they're available for use, presumably, because he pays their salaries. Here, too, he controls them only to the extent that he's utterly dependent on them. They only exist out of necessity. Presumably he loathes them too.

(If they are not given a chance to show what it's like to work under such a cruel and hostile boss, well, the accompanist will get a chance what Henry does to far more selfless employees than they. The collaborator will become a worker, and we'll see just what happens to worker who dare to have feelings of their own. But admittedly the undercurrent of labor exploitation is just an undercurrent in this film.)

Henry tickles Ann. It's the only thing he does to make her laugh. Why does he tickle her? She doesn't seem to like it: both times he tickles her, it's portrayed as an act of horrific aggression, borderline-nonconsensual, enacted as if it's the murder scene in a horror film. In his second act, Henry tells his audience that he murdered his wife—and how did he murder her? By tickling her to death, which he re-enacts in stunning pantomime, so violently physical and grotesque that it resembles a butoh performance.

He doesn't know why she loves him, but he's a comedian. Surely that's why she must love him, right? We think that, the audience thinks that, the tabloids think that, and Henry thinks it too. And what use is a comedian who you don't laugh at? So he tickles her, and it feels like an assault. And then he tells his audience just that: he tickled her, because her love for him made him sick, and his sickness kept him from being funny, so he forced her to laugh and now she's dead.

That's what alienates the audience: when Henry tells them that he's murdered his wife. But are they really offended by the content of what he's saying? Or is what offends them the glimmering self-awareness in his act: the fact that his "gift" is only given to him by people who want him to hate himself, that the woman who loves him doesn't need or even want him to make her laugh, and that his determination to give her what he gives his audience is putting her life at risk? (There's an echo, perhaps intentional, of Hannah Gadsby's now-famous Nanette, in which she asks whether she's turning jokes out of traumatic experiences, and encouraging her audiences to belittle and dismiss the violence that she's suffered.)

Why do they turn on him? Why does this end up being his final show? Perhaps it isn't because they're offended by the misogyny of what he's saying—they're seemingly fine with all sorts of other offensive subjects. No: perhaps his true offense is that Henry speaks the one truth out loud that he can't mask with a joke. He asks, out loud, if he needs their laughter—if he even wants them laughing at him. And in asking that—in asking whether he wants to keep "earning" the right to tell them the truth with jokes—he suggests that he might take away the power they've had over him all along, take away his own powerlessness, step out of his self-imposed cage. That's the one thing they can't accept. And they respond by turning on him, en masse, in one final imposition of their power: they end his career on their terms, not on his.

The tabloids gleefully portray the disintegration of his marriage to Ann as inspired by the collapse of his career, concluding that his happiness and sense of self, and her happiness with him, all came from the celebrity that they so meticulously established. What's really disintegrating, meanwhile, is Henry's belief that Ann could love him: that she could give him something so meaningful, when he doesn't feel he has meaning at all.

When the storm hits the two of them at sea, Henry is gleeful, drunk as much on it as on anything else. In a sense, the storm is him: an outward reflection of his deep internal instability. ("But where's the stage?" goes Annette's opening number. "Is it outside, or is it within?") He shares himself with Ann in the only way he knows how: in turbulence, in neglectful, uncaring tumult. She is terrified; she begs him to get a grip on himself. But he doesn't know how. He's lost the only other way he knew how to make sense of himself to her, and now she's getting a dangerous honesty. He needs her to love him, and he betrays her at the same time, not despite or even because of his need, but through it. He forces her into a deadly waltz, forces her into the romance that she was more-than-willing to give him for free. In showing her what he thinks is the depth of his need—but what is really only the depth of his inability to accept what she already gives him—he asks her for something she can't give him, something that makes her try and pull away. He's trying to ask her for love, but what he's really asking her for is what his audiences asked him for, and what she gave her audience without their ever asking.

"Save me," he asks without asking.

"You'll kill me," she says.

And then she dies.

Not for him, but because of him. Because, in a sense, it was the only way he could conceive of his need, or of her love.

In Henry's final duet with Ann—the penultimate song of the film—he imagines going back in time and giving Ann the one thing she wanted all along:

In other words, that what she needed from him wasn't his stage show. It was, simply, his love for her, his willingness to see her, his willingness to find joy in her. And in turn, he imagines her response:

Ann, at this point, is long-dead—Henry's singing this after being sentenced to life in prison for murder. You could see this song as a final gasp of male self-pity, of wishing that she could have not only her life but her career, and that he could have his career back too. But that's misleading: what he's wishing for, here, is simply that he could have understood the way he should have needed her, rather than the way he tried to need her.

Here is one of Annette's central profundities, hiding in plain sight as one of its central so-called banalities: she loved him because she loved him, and what she needed from him was for him to love her just because he loved her. Profound insights are often simple: the profundity lies, not in their difficulty, but in how difficult it is to strip away all the untruths which distract us from that simplicity, adding complexity that pulls us further away from meaning.

Ann is compared, in multiple ways, to Christ: she dies for her audience, and in so doing saves them. She loves Henry, and Henry forsakes her. But the most profoundly Christian thing about her is Annette's depiction of her love, unconditional, endless, merciful. There is no stipulation; Henry can't figure out what he has to offer her because here there is no quid pro quo. Even in her private thoughts, she never hints at falling out of love with him: only at fear that her love will not be enough. All Henry had to do to save her was to love her back, without questioning or seeking to prove his love; instead, in his doubt, he turns to her like Orpheus turns to Eurydice, and in so doing condemns her to death.

Annette makes sure, however, not to liken Ann's deaths for her audiences to her death at Henry's hands. Sure, the stories in those operas are the same as the story of her with him—but one is given willingly and one is stolen from her, and in death she haunts Henry rather than saving him. "I will be with you every day," she sneers at him, in the courtroom where he is sentenced, her hair still wet from the storm; she is a siren in the sense of the old Italian fairy tale, the kind who is forged in her need to avenge herself upon the one who wronged her. Her voice lures, not random sailors, but the man who killed her. And that voice manifests itself, not merely in her ghost, but in the child—Annette, "little Ann"—she leaves in her turbulent wake.

On the night of her mother's death, Annette begins to sing in her mother's voice. The wordless melody is that of her Ann's old aria, the one of wandering on a moonless night, frightened of her former lover. Annette's voice is a curse—but of course Henry sees it as a miracle, as one last remnant of the woman he loved.

He brings the accompanist, now a conductor, on board. This is not about his future, Henry insists: it is about giving Annette a future. What kind of future? The only kind of success Henry has ever known, of course—validation at an audience's hands.

Annette is a hit. A far greater hit than either of her parents, not because of her voice, but because she is a novelty: a gimmick, a brand. Fandoms pop up around her, around the globe. It happens unsettlingly fast, because we feel like at last we're at the meat of the story, but Annette couldn't be bothered: the story of this child, start-to-finish, is told across the length of approximately one song. Maybe two.

And then Henry comes home to find Annette singing the song he used to sing with his dead wife. The conductor taught it to her while Henry was out.

"How dare you teach her that song!" Henry yells.

"Henry," the conductor says, "I wrote that song." It was an expression of his love for Ann, with Ann: the two of them had an affair, it is revealed, shortly before Henry walked into Ann's life. And there is every chance that Annette is really his.

(Meanwhile, what was Henry out doing? Drinking at the club, lusting after beautiful women, wondering whether any of them could possibly love him like Ann loved him. These girls, however, are jaded and dismissive of him, in a way he probably deserves but that Ann never would have inflicted on him: "Hard to imagine all these fucking men," they sing, "who hate themselves but want us to love them." Is that a wisened attitude that insists men take responsibility for themselves, or is it the refusal to offer someone a possible saving grace? Annette doesn't voice a judgment either way; the uncomfortable reality is that it's both.)

Henry is aghast at this development, enraged at the conductor for daring to love the woman who loved him, terrified of losing Annette. But there is more, because the conductor's love is gentle, not furious; offered unquestioningly and without doubt; given to Annette about a concern about Henry's using his perhaps-illegitimate daughter to maintain his own lecherous, self-hating lifestyle. He does it for Annette and Annette alone. And perhaps what Henry sees, what Henry is afraid to face, is that this was the love he could have offered Ann all along, and offered Annette at that. The conductor is a better man than Henry, not because he has more worth, but because he never questioned his; he was an accompanist when that was the only path he had, and became a conductor when it was allowed, and all the while he thought only of loving Ann, and then of loving the only part of herself that Ann left behind.

Henry puts Annette's performance of Ann's fearful, lonely aria on display; the conductor sings Annette a song about love. Henry is afraid of Annette not being his, but expresses his feelings not towards Annette herself, but by getting drunk and drowning the accompanist in his slowly-decaying house pool. What he fears and hates isn't his biological claim to her: it's the realization that he may not truly love her, and may not have loved his wife the way she needed him to.

There is a subtle change here. The fear is no longer of not being worthy of Annette's love: it's of not giving Annette the love she deserves. This is a maturation on Henry's part. And so, too, is this: he announces that Annette will retire from singing, never to be seen in the public eye again. He will not put her on display; he will not use her. He is trying to learn, trying to grow. And of course it is too late.

The siren's voice has lured him this far, and now it lures him to his demise: Annette, rather than singing her last aria, instead speaks her first words, and Ann's last: "My father kills people." Kills, not murdered; people, not person. Henry did not mean to kill Ann, but Ann is dead because of him. Now her vengeance is made manifest, and she ends Henry's life too.

And then the miracle: Annette becomes a real girl.

Have we not covered the fact that, all this time, Annette was just a wooden doll? All along, well before Ann died, she was artificial, her face unchanging, only her eyes moving. Only in the end, when Henry is locked behind bars—a different cage than from his ape days, and with a much smaller audience—does a young girl emerge, casting the former puppet of herself aside.

(Surely it's coincidence—right?—that Ann was played by Marion Cotillard, and that Annette, "little Ann", was voiced by her. Marionette. That couldn't have been deliberate. Could it?)

It's the film's final duet, and a stunning duet: Devyn McDowell, age five, holding her own against Adam Driver at his loudest and most impassioned. But it's stunning for more than just that. Here is the final message of the film, the final miracle, the final tragedy. Henry, at last, beholds his daughter as human, and seemingly has found something human in himself. He doesn't ask her for her love. All he asks is that she let him love her, the way he should have loved Ann all along. And she refuses.

More than that: she insists she'll never sing again, never bring the same light into this world which her mother defined herself by: "Shunning the lights at night, smashing every lamp I see, living in full darkness, a vampire forever." And she tells her father that she will strive to forgive and forget, not just him, but her mother—and when Henry pleads with her, it's not for his sake, but for Ann's. "Don't blame her," he says.

What did Ann do? What does Annette feel the need to forgive her for? Was it shacking up with Henry in the first place, not leaving him when she had the chance, not fleeing when she saw the danger? Was it bestowing this voice upon Annette, giving her the same gift which drew men like Henry to her, looking to consume her and possess her, looking to be saved?

It's possible to interpret this as Annette rejecting her mother's tendency to be defined by men, devoted to men, helpless before men. But it's also possible to interpret this as Annette rejecting her mother's curse, bestowed upon her by her voice: the legacy, not of loving or saving men, but of avenging her death at Henry's hands. Perhaps this is what Annette means when she sings of forgiving and forgetting both her parents: forgiving Henry for his obvious crimes, but forgiving her mother for dying, for leaving her, for putting her in a place where her duty, in a figurative and literal sense, is to haunt and condemn and curse her own father.

"Her deadly poison I became," she sings, "merely a child to exploit."

Perhaps this is Ann's final act of mercy and compassion and love, her final Christ-like grace: to forgive the unforgivable, not because Henry has earned forgiveness, but precisely because he hasn't. And to forgive her mother for something which her mother never meant to inflict upon her, a tragic death which Annette can't help but resent, which makes the resentment—and the admission that it's an act that she finds necessary to forgive—all the harder to contend with.

What she won't allow, can't allow, is for Henry to use her—not even now that he's fully realized his mistake, realized the error of his ways, realized something profound about himself. (You can choose not to believe that Henry has truly changed by the end, or that Henry was capable of change, or that he has "earned" anything, or that he is deserving of his daughter's love; personally, I find that a far more tragic possibility than that he truly was doomed to be an ape and a narcissist all along.)

For Henry, loving Annette still serves a final gesture, not to his daughter, but to his wife. He wants to offer Annette what he never offered Ann. And Annette rejects that—because it is still a possession of her, a means to an end, an unwilling sacrifice of herself to an audience, even if it's just an audience of one.

"I must be strong," she tells herself and Henry.

And in his and the movie's last lines, Henry understands. "Goodbye, Annette," he sings, one final repetition, "Goodbye Annette, goodbye Annette, goodbye." The Greeks understood: it is not a tragedy if the one whose downfall it is isn't capable of fully understanding the depths of his own downfall. For Henry to end this film the same shell of a man he always was wouldn't be a tragedy for him: for Ann and Annette and the man he killed, yes, but his fate would truly be no more than the caging of an animal, dumb and unthinking and incapable of recognition. In proper Greek tragedy, the one who falls becomes aware of himself at last, but only when it's far too late for him to turn back time; now, to truly prove that he has grown, Henry must accept his fate, and accept that it's the one that he deserves, whether he has his daughter's forgiveness or not.

Tragedy does not make for satisfying entertainment, in the sense that we usually think of entertainment—and Annette is unusually Brechtian in that it acknowledges every possible way that it could satisfy us, all the kinds of entertainment we could be getting, in order to flatly refute them. Tragedy is cruel. Henry is a beastly man, yet we are denied even the satisfaction of fierily condemning him. The accompanist is a gentle and loving man, and he is killed in a helpless way, for the crime of loving the girl who could be his daughter. Annette comes to life and sings one glorious song, and then never sings again. And Ann is a saintly and loving woman, yet she dies too soon, and is defined in both life and death by her husband and what her husband does to her.

But I want to talk about Ann's place in this movie. The critics aren't wrong to say that Henry is at the center of this story—but if Ann's role is defined by her relationship to her husband, it's equally true that Henry is tormented, in life and death, by his wife. He is defined by his inability to understand her love for him; his violent acts are a violent disregard for himself, in a way that hurts everyone around him. And if the film is willing to tell a story about a man who harms everyone in his life without wholly condemning him, it is also willing to tell a story about a woman who is willing to love that man—a woman who is willing, full-stop, to love—in a parasitic world. It's a story of a woman with the courage to maintain that love in the face of danger—and a depiction, in the end, of how her daughter finds a way to be guarded without being cynical, to love without allowing exploitation, to walk that narrow path which neither of her parents found.
 
Ann is Henry's victim, but in a sense she is also a victim of her own willingness to love—for it is her love that ignites the fire in Henry, and her inability to stop loving him that dooms her. Yet at the same time, she holds a power in this film that nobody else has: not Henry, whose power is to destroy, or the various audiences of this world, whose power is to feed. "I saved them," she says of her audience. And if she's elusive about why she offers what she offers, or about what she sees in Henry, she is not elusive about this: not unaware about why these dangerous men are drawn to her, not uncertain about what she truly offers them.

Note this: Henry gives his audience what he thinks they want. Ann gives her audience only herself, only what she has within. Henry can't see his own worth. But Ann never once questions her own.

When Henry first comes to her, after his performance and hers, he holds her, tenderly, and shows her a moment of brief unguarded fondness. "Good boy," she says, with a smile. Henry echoes that word in his closing duet with her: "I'm a small boy, wide-eyed in my awe at your silken voice." If we want to talk about the conspicuous maleness of Henry, or the caricaturish femaleness of Ann, we have to talk about this too: the part where she is certain of herself in a way that he is not, or where what he wishes he'd offered her was an awed, boyish admiration, a love defined not by achievement or earning but by vulnerability, simplicity, and tenderness.

I think a lot about James Kochalka's The Cute Manifesto, which argues that the reason why we respond to the joy of children or the sweetness of puppies and kittens and what-have-you is that cuteness is a pure form of beauty, unfiltered and unrestrained and unshaped and untouched. What do we look like before we change ourselves for our onlookers, to suit what we think they need? The Tao Te Ching similarly uses the metaphor of uncut wood to describe the soul at peace: not the perfection of smoothed corners and polished surfaces, but the perfection of something which simply is, without filter. Or look at the gentle philosophy of the film Boyhood, which from one perspective is a story about a boy confronted by endless distorted images of masculinity and what "being a man" should look like, rejecting all of them and finding a gentler path, bit by bit. Is Henry's snarling, violent act, his rage and force, his contempt of others, his willingness to kill, as powerful as whatever he took away from his wife's act, simply by listening to her sing? Is it as powerful as his willingness to face his daughter calmly, even as she tells him he cannot love her from his cell? Whatever Ann found in her love, she expressed it openly and readily, never holding back, never shying from the cameras and paparazzi. They melted away before her, as if they didn't exist at all. Only he did—and while she feared his hidden strangenesses, she never withheld that love.
 
What haunts Henry? The purity of a child's voice. The fear that he was only lovable because Ann alone could love him. The suggestion of another, gentler man who could love his wife and daughter in ways Henry was afraid to—not too weak to, not too impotent to, but afraid to.

You can look at Henry's complexity, his facets, his internal conflict, as proof that he is given room to be "more human" than anyone else in this movie. Or you can see all that as precisely the things that damn him: his inability to be boyish, to be uncut, to be simple. You can see him as the ferocious engine that drives Annette. Or you can see his haunting, gentle wife, and the daughter who embraces and departs him on her own terms, as the movie's heart, and all of Henry's struggles as proof that he is forever caught up in their wake.

So why is Annette such a difficult movie, so antagonistic, so abrasive? Why is it so obvious in all the ways we want it to be subtle, and so elusive in the places where we want reassurance?

Does Annette, like Henry, hate the people who it tries to please? Does Leos Carax? Do Sparks? Or is it, perhaps, an ambitious failure, inadequate and unsuited to its own demands?
 
I left the theater genuinely uncertain. But it was the kind of uncertainty that, while unsettling, led me to suspect I had experienced something astonishing, and just needed a moment to figure it all out.

Sparks is a notoriously elusive and enigmatic band. This despite the fact that their songs are, at times, aggressively accessible and shallow: the "adolescent misogyny" they were offhandedly accused of in 1977 appears if you take their songs at face value, and assume that they're either mocking or endorsing the kinds of girl-craziness that has suffused their music from the very start. The idea that they are neither mocking nor endorsing the things they say is tricky, in a world where everything is either meant to be taken at face value or as its precise opposite. There are glimmers of sincerity, hints of tongue-in-cheek, bits and pieces of parody and horror and condemnation, traces of the sorts of nostalgia you have for things you know are bad. They have moments that are purely poppy, moments where they're archly theatrical, moments that embrace aggressive coolness and condescension, moments that are adolescent in their juvenile enthusiasms or self-consciousness, moments that are far too strange and avant-garde to categorize.

What Carax brings, on top of that, is an awareness that our performances betray something vulnerable, and that the moments when we intend to be vulnerable are often the ones where, whether we realize it or not, we are being calculating. There is no escaping artifice and there is no escaping sincerity. Only by insisting on one or the other are we fooling ourselves; the insistence that these things are opposites of one another, or that each negates the other, is where we start to distort our vision and our awareness, because we start to squeeze big things into very narrow categories.

I was excited for Carax to direct Sparks because I expected him to take their elaborate constructions, their meticulous artifice, and turn them into something raw and unfiltered and aggressive; at the same time, I expected him to take their most vulnerable moments and turn them into something fantastic, some kind of clever and mythic contraption, without losing sight that there had been vulnerability there to begin with. In a sense, each shared the other's vision, not in the sense that each had the same intents or brought the same ideas to the table, but in the sense that both have the same perverse desire—or rather, a non-perverse desire to perversify, a belief that only lies are straightforward, that simplicity masks complexity, that all complexity is on some level very simple and vice versa.

Annette indulges you when you're not expecting indulgence, only to pull away right when you're expecting fulfillment. It takes everything you want to be subtle and deep and provides it to you flatly, defying you the chance to burrow down in the ways you're accustomed to. At the same time, it presents you with things that are so obvious you want to push past them and move on, and holds you there, as if there something there is worth paying attention to after all. It's corny where you want sophistication, and then it takes corny ideas and makes something sophisticated out of them after all. It screams certain themes in your face, and acts as if certain other themes aren't present at all—trusting that you'll work them out if you go looking, and that, if you don't, perhaps you didn't care to in the first place.

Above all, it is entertainment in the sense that it is continually fascinating, impossible to look away from, hard to anticipate or take for granted—and it is not entertainment in the sense that it does not resort to common tricks to hold your attention. There is no mystery here, yet it is mysterious. There is no attempt to "humanize" its characters, which is not to say they are not deeply and painfully human. You are given nothing relatable, but there is plenty to relate to. It knows all the tricks to win you over, and it makes sure you know the tricks, and then it gives you none of that.

It is a movie that doesn't want to present itself for Henry's audience, or to Ann's either. If anything, it wants to be a movie for Henry, for Ann, for people who struggle with something more than how to package yourself, how to be accessible, how to be likable, how to "deserve" love. It wants to be a movie for people who struggle with others and themselves, people who hate and people who forgive, people who hurt the ones they love and people who stick around and let themselves be hurt. It is, perhaps, a movie intended for Annette, which would explain why the first shot of the film is of Leos Carax talking to his own daughter, telling her the show is about to begin. A musical, not to escape life from, but to confront life alongside, with comforts that won't distract you from the uncomfortable, pleasures that can coexist with the unpleasant, difficult things that may in their way help you find some ease.

"May we start?" ask Carax and Sparks and Driver and Cotillard and all the backup singers, in the movie's opening number. "May we start," asked again and again, an aggressive act of pandering or a gesture of increasing impatience, or maybe both at once, and highly tongue-in-cheek either way. "May we start? May we? May we now start?" They're laughing with you, not at you, and they're hoping that you'll laugh with rather than at them back. Co-conspirators of the same joke, co-authors of the same tragedy. It doesn't have to be either/or, you know, you or them, good or bad, male or female, black or white. Some things can be both at once, all depending on how you've learned to look, the hidden answers to their own questions. May we start? Mais oui.