Henry McHenry (Driver), performing as “The Ape of God,” is (as the show’s unnamed host declares) a “mildly offensive” and “world-infamous” standup comedian who at the start of the action has met and fallen in love with Cotillard’s character, an opera singer named Ann Defrasnoux. The story is spare, and most of its drama, anchored in and around Los Angeles, is depicted along with the singing of songs, largely in lieu of dialogue, that evoke the characters’ states of mind. That’s the movie’s peak of exuberance and discovery, a riffy and joyful initiation into a dour tale of male vanity and arrogance, a story of downfall with its sense of tragedy foreclosed and turned into a blankly nihilistic tale of wanton destruction-along with a moralistic message of good riddance. Driver and Cotillard are handed costumes and transform into their characters, who then head off to gigs-Henry to the Orpheum Theatre and Ann to Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall.
They commence-with a song, “So May We Start,” echoing the director’s mild-mannered request-and leave the studio in an extended procession that the film’s trio of lead actors (Driver, Marion Cotillard, and Simon Helberg) join, along with a quartet of female backup singers and an entire entourage, trooping in loose rhythm through the streets.
Over the opening credits, a voice that sounds like Carax’s asks viewers not to “sing, laugh, clap, cry, yawn, boo, or fart” while the movie’s playing, and reminds them that “breathing will not be tolerated during the show, so please take a deep last breath right now.” He’s the movie’s first onscreen presence, manipulating the board in a Santa Monica recording studio where Sparks is performing Carax’s real-life teen-age daughter, Nastya Golubeva Carax, is in the background, and he calls her over when he’s about to prompt the musicians to start. Sparks, who also wrote the songs (with additional lyrics by Carax), is in many ways a brilliant film and in many ways an astoundingly audacious one, yet it’s not entirely a satisfying one-it doesn’t reimagine the very possibilities of cinema as comprehensively as Carax’s best films, because the studio in Carax’s head is signified by its star, Adam Driver. Leos Carax’s film “Annette,” a musical based on a story by the brothers Ron and Russell Mael, a.k.a. Even outside of studios, many filmmakers work as if something like a studio has got inside their heads. When Martin Scorsese says that superhero movies aren’t “cinema,” he’s referring not to their story lines but to their modes of production: the overmanaged, studio-controlled exploitation and protection of a franchise’s-wait for it-“intellectual property.” But artistic freedom isn’t only the absence of contractual constraint equally important is inner freedom, a director’s readiness to make a film that risks running athwart the commercial conditions of its production.