Tag: Marion Cotillard

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Annette

The music of brothers Ron and Russell Mael, better known as the band Sparks, has always invited the descriptor “cinematic.” Maybe it’s their elaborate arrangements or Ron’s literate, self-aware lyrics. Or maybe it’s their album covers, which always hinted at little stories, like Propaganda, where they were bound and gagged in the back of a speedboat, apparently being taken by unseen kidnappers to be dumped in international waters. Why? Who knows. That’s Sparks for you.

As detailed in Edgar Wright’s excellent documentary The Sparks Brothers, the Maels, who started in the late 1960s, had their first hit in the glam rock era, and practically invented synth-pop, took to music videos like fish to water. At the end of the MTV ’80s, they tried to expand into film with hot new director Tim Burton, pitching a musical version of the manga Mai, the Psychic Girl. It sounded impossibly weird back then, especially once Burton became the biggest filmmaker in the world with Batman, and it never came to fruition. But looking back from 2021, where Japanese manga and anime artists have conquered the globe, the idea seems way ahead of its time. Again, that’s Sparks for you.

Henry McHenry (Adam Driver) and Ann Defrasnoux (Marion Cotillard) are parents to a baby played by a wooden puppet.

With Wright’s doc premiering at Sundance and getting wide release, it seems finally, 50 years into their career, Sparks’ time has come. (Of course, the film had the misfortune of premiering the same year as Oscar-shoo-in Summer of Soul, which is perfectly on-brand for the band’s snakebite career.) Now the brothers have finally gotten to fulfill their big screen musical ambitions with Annette, a long-brewing collaboration with French director Leos Carax. It’s beautiful, elaborate, obtuse, uncompromising, and either ahead of its time or outside of the concept of time. In other words, it’s very Sparks.

Annette stars Adam Driver as Henry McHenry, a comedian in the perpetually aggrieved style of Lenny Bruce, who falls deeply in love with opera singer Ann Defrasnoux, played by Marion Cotillard. After a whirlwind (and extremely horny) courtship and marriage, the couple gives birth to Annette, a beautiful baby girl played for most of the movie by a puppet. But there’s trouble in paradise. Ann’s ex is her accompanist (Simon Helberg), and his continued presence brings out Henry’s jealous side. Meanwhile, Henry’s new show “The Ape of God” — which is little more than Henry lashing out at the audience — is bombing, while Ann’s career is taking off. Things come to a head when a drunken Henry sails the couple’s yacht into a storm. Then the really weird stuff starts.

About halfway through Annette, I turned to my wife and said, “Adam Driver is our Brando.” The guy is good at everything from stealing the show as Kylo Ren in the Star Wars sequel trilogy to embodying the gawky, quiet poet in Paterson. Annette proves he’s game for anything. It’s like Brando singing in Guys and Dolls, only instead of appearing in a popular Broadway musical, it’s a deeply weird, experimental glam rock opera. Who else would risk their career for this? Who else could pull it off so well?

Speaking of pulling it off, a few minutes later I said to my wife, “Wow, he sure is shirtless a lot.” Carax knows he’s got two of the most beautiful people on the planet, and he’s not afraid to shoot them in all their glory, with sex scenes that look like Caravaggio paintings. Did I mention they’re singing during the sex scenes?

Carax isn’t afraid of anything. The visuals are just as striking and experimental as the music. He puts his stars on the back of a real motorcycle, singing into the wind with no helmets. The emotions are big and brash, flirting with the outlandish, until it comes to a boil in an absolute barn burner of a final scene.

Annette is going to be called “too weird” by a lot of people whose favorite films involve space wizards and flying men in tights, but for me, it was the perfect amount of weird. In an industry that promises magic but delivers conformity, it’s a fresh breath of originality. That’s Sparks for you.

Categories
Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Two Days, One Night

Fabrizio Rongione and Marion Cotillard in Two Days, One Night

The premise of Jean-Luc and Pierre Dardenne’s Two Days, One Night is as impersonal and blankly bottom-dollar as a pink slip: “16 pieces of paper. Pick ‘Sandra or bonus’ and put it in the box.”

So it goes for the working-class heroes and villains who populate the world of Belgium’s Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, the internationally acclaimed sibling writer-producer-director-collaborators who have yet to make an uninteresting or irrelevant feature. It’s both fair and wrong to complain that Two Days, One Night is another one of their timely meditation on the myriad ways capitalism and Big Business grind up and discard the little guys nobody notices; after all, nobody complains about people seeking revenge in movie after movie. However, the Dardennes’ latest film differs from previous works in both storytelling style and star power. It lacks the itchy and anxious momentum of 2011’s The Kid With A Bike or 2008’s Lorna’s Silence; its rhythms mirror Sandra, its depressed and beaten-down protagonist, who slowly shuffles forward on her quest to win support from her co-workers in a fog of druggy, dolorous resignation that occasionally lifts during brief, clumsy surges of violence.

And this time the Dardennes got themselves a ringer for their nosy and unsparing handheld camera. The actress playing Sandra isn’t some non-professional discovery or some capable, obscure European craftsperson; she’s Oscar winner and Christopher Nolan mainstay Marion Cotillard. But Cotillard’s presence is not as distracting as it could have been. She strips herself of all glamour with some shrugs of her shoulders, some slow blinks of her eyes, and a general inertness that, oddly, equips her for doing all those normal things the normal people in Dardenne brothers movies do—checking on dinner in the oven, sleeping through a ringing phone, or staring out the passenger-side window of an automobile while her husband (Fabrizio Rongione, so naturalistic he practically disappears into the breakfast nook) drives her around.

The film is sort of suspenseful because all the Dardennes’ films are sort of suspenseful. It’s also slow, spacy, stultifying. Except for two songs overhead on a car radio, there’s no music to speak of; moments of disappointment and moments of compassion almost feel equivalent. In a few ways, Two Days, One Night is like a grown-up version of Rosetta, the Dardennes’ 1999 film about a young girl so desperate to get a job that she’ll rip off and double-cross anyone who stands in her way. This time it’s about a grown woman so desperate to keep her job that she’ll beg others to take one for the team.

The subtext of Sandra’s interactions with her co-workers, and the main subject of the film, is responsibility. Who’s to blame for this situation? What can I do to help? And how can I do that without harming my own chances for success? One of the great and troublesome tasks of human existence is trying to figure out the limit of your own actions. At what point do your behaviors stop being your own and become mere reactions to a larger system designed to make you act in this way? There aren’t any simple answers in the film, which might be another way of saying there aren’t any answers at all.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Rust & Bone

French import Rust & Bone — a late-2012 film arriving in local theaters this week — is the year’s second sexually frank film about a protagonist negotiating a disability and the second one to better its premise on the strength of an exceptional lead performance. Unlike The Sessions, which featured John Hawkes as a man living in an iron lung who seeks out a sex surrogate to help him lose his virginity, Rust & Bone‘s concerns aren’t limited to the subject of discovering — or, in this case, rediscovering — one’s sexuality in the face of physical complications. Like The Sessions, the lead here — French actress Marion Cotillard — was denied the Oscar nomination that might have boosted her film’s box office and general profile.

Cotillard, who won the Oscar for playing Edith Piaf in 2007’s La Vie en Rose and followed it up with a series of supporting turns in high-profile English-language films such as Public Enemies, Nine, Inception, and The Dark Knight Rises, is back in the spotlight here as Stephanie, who is battered at a nightclub and taken home by the club’s new bouncer, Alain (Matthias Schoenaerts), who invites himself in to ice his swollen hand, mean-mugs Stephanie’s sketchy boyfriend, and leaves his number.

This meet-cute of sorts remains unresolved for a while. Stephanie returns to her job. (Which inspires questions such as: Do the French really do the wave at whale shows?) Alain returns to his two chief activities — bad parenting (he’s got a young son) and amateur street-fighting (he had a short-lived pro career). But tragedy strikes Stephanie at a show when an orca leaps on the deck and she ends up losing her legs, her later loneliness inspiring her to give Alain a call.

This unlikely romance bears unexpected fruit thanks, in large part, to Cotillard, whose performance is soulful and believable but de-glammed and never mawkish. The moment when she wakes up in a hospital and discovers her fate is tough but believable, as is her return to normalcy — her first post-accident swim, her negotiation of sex, the simple act of sorting through her closet and discarding high-heels. All of these are grace notes, as is, unlikely as it seems, solo wheelchair dances to “Love Shack” and Katy Perry’s “Fireworks.”

Meanwhile, in a year full of 3-D, action blockbusters, and The Hobbit, Rust & Bone probably features the most impressive and affecting CGI of the year.

The direction, from Jacques Audiard, who helmed the impressive 2009 prison drama A Prophet, feels overstylized at first, with lots of slow-motion and dissonant use of music, both pop songs and traditional score, but the film finds its footing in the heart of Stephanie and Alain’s relationship, midway through, before perhaps running astray again with a final plot turn.

Rust & Bone

Opening Friday, January 18th

Studio on the Square