Annette

And The Rising Price Of Prison Telecommunications

So may we start?

You could throw a million darts at a million different talent permutations, and you’d never land on Leos Carax directing a musical with Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard featuring original songs from Sparks. This is a real oddity, and when I read critical appraisal of the film a few years back, it didn’t sound like anyone knew what to make of this. I do wish critics would just acknowledge this confusion. It’s not likely that a lot of critics will be able to understand a movie about baseball, for example, because many fans of the arts don’t enjoy sports. Someone who isn’t very sexual will struggle with an erotic thriller. Some who see “Annette” might be Sparks fans, but they may not know what to make of Carax. And some are used to challenging, unusual, counterintuitive cinema, but they have no idea who cult rock act Sparks really are.

Me, I don’t know what to do with the puppet. But we’ll get to that.

Driver and Cotillard are a couple who perform separately. She’s Ann Desfranoux, a classical opera singer with reservations about being the center of attention for her talent. He’s Henry McHenry, an avant-guard confrontational standup comedian who seeks out audience rebellion. One partakes in a long-accepted art form, the other seems determined to alienate others on his way towards finding a new sense of performance.

The movie early on successfully separates these two on massive stages to illustrate how they exist on entirely different planets. She cultivates, he destroys. There’s a lot more attention paid towards his act, however, the only extended moments of the film that are not sung. McHenry’s routine is, ah, an acquired taste. He comes across like a version of Bo Burnham that wants to investigate and interrogate the artform, but also brutalize and shame his fans. There are no real conventional jokes in his routine, but he seems to perform for mainstream audiences, many of whom are surprised when he turns on them.

There’s an old story about Adam McKay doing agit-prop comedy at Upright Citizens Brigade shows, how he would often do routines that emptied out the theater. In the nineties, before the age of the internet, he apparently had a bit where he’d come into the theater and tell everyone that the President had just been shot, it wasn’t a joke or a bit, everyone should stay seated until they find out more. Then a colleague would wheel in a TV, and McKay would tell everyone they’re going to watch the news to find out the details. Instead, he’d pop in a VHS of sports bloopers, and he and his friend would pull up a chair and watch, and laugh, for however long until the theater cleared out. Maybe it’s an unfair comparison, but McHenry never pulls off anything as funny or as darkly satirical as that.

Ann and Henry have a baby, and the film’s decision to spotlight little Annette yields one of the movie’s more intriguing creative decisions – little Annette is played by a puppet. Sometimes just a doll, sometimes a marionette, Annette nonetheless commands attention from the couple and from us, the audience. Naturally, Henry detests this. There’s a bit of jealousy afoot. But also Henry cannot help but see Annette as a beta version of Ann. And he crows and rails at this in equal measure, since this is not just a manifestation of his wife. It’s an Ann that he’s created himself. Because he can create, he can destroy. Poor Ann bears the brunt of this.

Henry tortures and belittles Ann, who seems wracked by postpartum depression, uncertain what a child has done to her career or marriage. All the while, The Accompanist pines for Ann. Simon Helberg used his piano skills to appear in both “Florence Foster Jenkins” and this, carving a necessary path for himself after appearing in “The Big Bang Theory” for years. Good for him, because otherwise, it’s probably difficult to nab respectable roles when you have a face that tells people who have never seen “The Big Bang Theory” that you probably spent a lot of time on “The Big Bang Theory”. I’m rooting for you, Simon. But also, the “Big Bang Theory” residuals are probably huge, so, I’m not rooting that much.

The songs from Sparks are less poppy than you’d expect, more of an operetta. Their work is known for being tongue-in-cheek and spotlighting humorously vulnerable lyrics, but the songs here are darker, less tuneful. I suppose Sparks fans would go into a Sparks musical expecting Sparks-type songs, but this feels like an experiment, more of a bold leap into the unknown. From the movie’s halfway point, the picture follows the arc of little Annette into a singer just like her mother. Darkness follows her, however, making the start of her young career already fraught with portent. This is, more or less, a pop opera about awful people and one puppet. I don’t know what to make of it, other than I was thrilled by the unpredictability.

I downloaded a few of the songs when I was in prison, so I was already familiar with some of them. “So May We Start” is a catchy and silly earworm that begins the movie with an immediate fourth wall break, as it seems like no one is singing in character. “We Love Each Other So Much” takes matters in a different direction – it is a love ballad between Ann and Henry, but the instrumentation is downbeat, bleak. They perform it during a sex scene, which gives further credence that this is a doomed relationship. Cotillard, who won an Oscar for playing Edith Piaf, has a gorgeous voice. Adam Driver, who fought a Star War, tries very hard, and almost carries a tune. True to Henry’s sense of angry audience defiance, we hear a lot more of his singing than we do her’s. Make of this what you will!

I want to say something here that is not controversial, and I am saying it as dispassionately as possible. As President, Joe Biden was active in trying to advocate and pass legislation that would reduce costs that consumers would have to pay towards major corporations. He attempted to fight the endless march of junk fees, including a cap on overdraft fees. One of his causes was to limit the amount of money companies could charge inmates (and therefore inmates’ families) for making phone calls. I was charged $3.15 per fifteen minute call in federal prison, but for many institutions, that number varied wildly and was more expensive for some. At least until, under Biden, the FCC opted to limit calls to either $0.06 or $0.07 per minute in 2024.

Whereas President Biden was active in trying to avoid excessive fees paid to these corporations, President Trump seems to have campaigned entirely towards the wealthy corporations who don’t like having their earning potential limited. The inmates in prison will now be price-gouged once again as Trump removes these protections, for the simple reason that he advocates for no limits on the wealthy. GEO Group, in particular, were active and generous contributors to the Trump campaign, and both Pam Bondi and Tom Homan have conducted business with the company, which is active in providing communications access to these facilities. Yes, GEO was technically a government contractor, and therefore they were legally prohibited from contributing to a Presidential campaign. Somehow, they did it anyway. Funny how that works.

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