While there’s real humor to be drawn from Kaufman reading The Great Gatsby in its entirety, Henry’s act is rough to sit through - yet his audience eats it up. His style is bombast, loud, aggressive in how much it wants the audience to laugh while simultaneously being extremely unfunny. Though viewers drew parallels to Bo Burnham and Hannah Gadsby, even noticing the similarity of the film’s title to Gadsby’s own special Nanette, Henry can just as easily fit in amongst the likes of Andy Kaufman and Andrew Dice Clay. His act mirrors not typical stand-up, but the likes of anti-comedians, as Brianna Zigler points out for Paste. In the fiction of the film, Henry McHenry is a stand-up comedian reminiscent of several popular styles throughout the history of comedy. These are just actors, playing parts just as much as their characters are, but once the song ends, Henry McHenry (Adam Driver) and Ann Desfranoux (Marion Cotillard) split up, heading to entirely new performances. Annette is a performance from the very beginning, and the audience is let in on this secret. Our stage is a recording studio, and the players that have created this film are acknowledging the role they play as storytellers. During a long, continuous take - our central characters join the director, his daughter, and Sparks to sing the opening number “So May We Start.” Carax notes that before the opening number begins, the film features “Au Clair de la Lune,” the first voice recording in history, then light is projected onto the screen and we enter the first scene of the film.
But this paradox - this clash between the artificial and the sincere - is the crux of the film, with each character torn between what performance truly means to them while existing in a world that is wholly unconcerned with adhering to realism.Īnnette opens with an admission and embrace of film as an art form. Artifice and performance are crucial to Annette, though all of our leads are performers, constantly on-stage to please an audience with stories and music and comedy. “There isn’t a distancing of what somebody is saying from how they’re feeling,” Mael continues, finding it fortunate that he and his brother, along with Carax, were aligned on this point. Discussing Leos Carax’s Annette with Mark Olsen of the Los Angeles Times, Ron Mael, along with brother and second half of the duo Sparks, Russell Mael, and Carax, stated that “sincerity was really primary as far as how the characters are projecting their feelings.” This might come as a shock to those who have seen Annette, which has been noted for its artificiality over and over again in reviews and features since its premiere last summer.
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