The hall gets dark, the film starts, but the image on the screen remains black. Instead, a man’s voice speaks, English with a French accent. It demands absolute attention and silence, total concentration on the show that is about to start. “Even breathing cannot be tolerated,” she says. “Take another breath before you start.” And you can actually hear people sucking in air loudly.
The opening film of the 74th Cannes Film Festival, the musical “Annette” with Marion Cotillard and Adam Driver, began on Tuesday. Everyone in the audience wore a mask, everyone was either vaccinated or freshly tested – and some probably wondered for a second whether this new rule should also be strictly followed. It wasn’t a hygienic measure that was increased to the absurd, but only the introduction of the French director Leos Carax into his very special work: a pre-announcement of trance-like conditions that should really take your breath away.
European vaccination certificates accept the strict bouncers, but Americans all have to go for testing
What a drama, however, to get to this point at all! After the festival was completely canceled last year, this time the reaction was postponed: from lovely May on the Côte d’Azur, where the sun is just warming up, to the midsummer madness of July. The hope that the vaccinations and the burning heat would slow down the virus far enough to dare a meeting of the film nations became more and more real, but with the anticipation, the fear of the last minute also increased: A German QR code with proof of vaccination one, a head-shaking French overseer on the other, plus a scanner that emits ugly tones of rejection. From the dream of the cinema, sorry. Vraiment désolé.
This critic’s personal nightmare has not come true – not for him, and not for most Europeans either. Overdue triumph of the community spirit: the Cannes scanners can read European anti-Covid codes. However, you are less fortunate with certificates from the rest of the world. So you saw vaccinated Americans who were cursed and sent to a lap of honor in the adjoining test tent. You will now be treated as hard as an unvaccinated person and will have to repeat the test procedure every 48 hours. The old suffering motto of the film buffs applies: what not to be done for Cannes …
It doesn’t matter, now it really starts on the screen and there is actually singing right away. The first thing to do is sing two older men who are quick to sing – that head voice! that pencil schnauzer! – as the singing duo Sparks identified. Ron and Russell Mael from Los Angeles are the masterminds of the whole Annette company, they developed the story and wrote all the thunder choir drama pop songs that you will hear about the film. They have found a soul mate in the Frenchman Leos Carax. The result is so strange that it’s fascinating again.
With the very first film you are thrown off track as a viewer
There is Marion Cotillard, who plays a famous soprano who has to die dramatically every evening on the opera stages of the world, sometimes gurgling consumptively, sometimes grandiose in decline. She fell madly in love with Adam Driver, a superstar on America’s comedy stages, whose solo show in a green bathrobe makes the masses riot every evening. It is not entirely clear why exactly, it is actually not weird. His show is full of self-hatred and confessional rage, and sometimes also verbal abuse of the audience in the sung interplay. But what Driver plays there – sometimes brooding and intense and genuinely dangerous, then singing and frolicking around without any safety net – is really a show in itself.
It gets really bizarre when the two have a girl named Annette, they give her a heart and a kiss and love her more than anything, even though Annette is a wooden doll. She has red hair, protruding ears and a technical inner workings that allow her to move jerkily, and once you see a red-hot heart beating inside her, just like Steven Spielberg and “ET”, the extraterrestrial back then. A scary baby par excellence, from whose wooden mouth you can also hear angelic singing. By then her mother is already dead, murdered by her father, and perhaps it is her restlessly wandering soprano soul that flows through the body of her wooden daughter …
But who can say that? In this opening film, logic has to give up its arms completely, most of the questions remain unanswered. But somehow that’s nice again, and above all it’s typical for Cannes. With the very first film you are thrown off track as a viewer, catapulted out of all common categories and ratings, and then you are ready again for amazement and horror and puzzles, which works best in the dark cinema room. So a good introduction to the most diverse cinematic worlds, in which one will still sink here for the next ten days.