Leos Carax, the enigmatic French director behind spectacularly peculiar films like “Holy Motors”, would rather speak of love. Or beauty. Or ghosts. Nothing but his new musical melodrama, “Annette”.
“There’s something crazy about a filmmaker – or any artist – being interviewed right after finishing a project,” Carax told me around cigarettes and water on a restaurant terrace in SoHo, his muffled and gritty voice.
“People ask me what my movies are about and I never know what to say,” he said. “There shouldn’t be questions and answers, but questions and more questions and doubts. “
In a cinematic landscape invaded by superheroes and sure ideas, Carax’s films are refreshing, outraged, provocative and intentionally overwhelming. “If you want to make a musical, you have to be ambitious or pretentious,” he added.
Naturally, each of his six feature films has been accompanied by a whirlwind of turmoil.
Carax, who is now 60, began his career at 23 with the dark black and white love story, “Boy Meets Girl,” a lyrical blend of classic cinematic tropes that heralded his arrival as a torchbearer. of French cinema. “Lovers on the Bridge” (1992), starring his then-girlfriend Juliette Binoche, was marred by its infamously long production schedule; To this day, the drama remains one of the most expensive French films ever made. “Pola X” (1999) was a provocative adaptation of “Peter or the Ambiguities” by Herman Melville, featuring an incestuous relationship and an unsimulated sex scene.
He avoids noise, if he can help it. Last month at the Cannes Film Festival, where he won the award for best director for his work on “Annette,” Carax skipped the closing ceremony. (Now in theaters, the musical will be available on Amazon starting next Friday.)
The film, Carax’s first in English, is a decidedly anti-commercial endeavor featuring artfully staged cunnilingus, several water graves and a singing baby puppet. Pernicious stand-up comedian Henry (Adam Driver) falls in love with Ann (Marion Cotillard), an ethereal opera singer. The couple’s heyday quickly gave way to Sturm und Drang when their bundle of (wooden) joy was born, triggering Henry’s chaotic decline.
‘Annette’, in typical Carax fashion, proved to be very controversial among critics: in The Times, AO Scott called her “totally unreal and completely truthful”, while Stephanie Zacharek of Time magazine said that the gain was “meager”. Reviewer Amy Taubin, who I spoke to on the phone, said she was “stunned.” Yet she found the film so “steeped in excruciating male guilt” that she would never see it again.
Written by Russell and Ron Mael of the pop duo Sparks, “Annette” was originally conceived as a concept album before Carax was hired to produce – a “liberating” experience for the filmmaker, including the method of scriptwriting (or his absence) implies scrambling to “organize your notes” simply for the purpose of securing funding.
“I’m not a storyteller,” he explained. “I try to compose emotional scores, like movements that flow in minor and major tones. I feel like an impostor when I have to speak. That’s what the camera is for. Without it, I feel stupid.
Over the phone, Cotillard – an admirer of Carax’s work since watching “Lovers on the Bridge” as an aspiring actress in the early ’90s – explained the virtues of her improvised approach. “I had done musicals where I had to record the songs and then lip-sync on set, but Leos made us sing everything live. It would have been frustrating not being able to change an intention or a feeling during filming because everything had already been recorded. “
A musically minded filmmaker whose work highlighted songs by David Bowie and Iggy Pop, Carax considered the collaboration with Sparks a ‘miracle’, adding, ‘Of all the music I’ve heard in my life , Sparks brought me the most joy. They are heartwarming, like a childhood home without all the family drama.
Carax remembers learning about the pop duo when he was a teenager, when he made more money by “stealing records and selling them,” he said. Yet at first, Carax declined the offer, not wanting the film’s strained father-daughter relationship to confuse his own teenage daughter, Nastya, or invite speculation about the parallels between the film and her life, given its tendency. to transform his male roles into agents of himself. However, he turned the tide when she took a liking to the songs Sparks sent her, creating an opportunity to clear up any misunderstandings.
For Taubin, “Annette” is a “fantasy staged miles from“ Pinocchio ”or“ The Wizard of Oz ”.
As resistant as he is to critical analysis, Carax agrees that his films try to tap into the children in us.
“Cinema is an art of haunting: of being haunted and of haunting others,” he said. “It has to do with ghosts and our childish connection with them. The image of an orphan in front of a screen is a feeling I come back to all the time.
After completing his secondary studies in the Parisian suburbs, Carax moved to the city on his own and obsessively frequented the Cinémathèque française. “It’s very powerful to be alone in a new city and watch silent movies,” he said. For all of its common pleasures, the cinematic experience can also be intimate and cerebral, a vivid dream – or nightmare – that pulls you onto its emotional wavelength.
Yet in Carax’s musical fantasia, people kill, fuck and go to the bathroom.
The murder is courtesy of Henry, a villain wearing a leather jacket whose towering figure and irascible personality erases those around him. Carax’s regular main character is shape-shifting, acrobatic Denis Lavant, who is considered one of the most distinctive performers in modern cinema, but the director has been drawn to Driver ever since he got there. saw him in the HBO series “Girls”.
“I needed movement – cinema is movement – and it has it; he’s ready to change his body, like an alien, ”Carax said.
One of the biggest challenges was building Henry’s number. “I needed to come up with two acts that were funny in a way that had never been done before, which was impossible,” Carax explained. “I found something intimate and actually not that funny.” Henry’s act is an onslaught of squeaky confession sprinkled with jokes on the gas chamber. It’s a mix of “wonderful, grotesque and obscene,” said Carax, which draws him so much to comedians like Andy Kaufman and Lenny Bruce.
For Ann – an intentionally archetypal figure reminiscent of the fragile young ladies in the history of cinema – Cotillard was entitled to an interview with Franco-German actress Romy Schneider. “Leos wanted me to study her behavior, how at one point she is confident and talks about her art, and the next she is full of love and vulnerability,” Cotillard said.
Carax lives what appears to be a quiet life with his daughter and spends his time playing the accordion (a hobby he chose after “Holy Motors”), reading, and taking night walks.
“I really need to be alone,” he said, adding: “It’s just hard to know who I want and who wants me.” He is content with the company of his pets: two dogs, two cats and a few ferrets.
Although his style is brimming with cinematic references, Carax no longer has any interest in watching movies – unless forced to do so by Nastya. Asked about his thoughts on the state of contemporary cinema, he was resigned.
“Cinema must reinvent itself, because it is losing power,” he said.
“We have ceased to be surprised by the arrival of a train at the station,” he continues, referring to the short film by the Lumière brothers from 1895. “Today, children see explosions and mutants, and this is no longer magic. “
Online speech doesn’t help.
“You have people on Facebook and Twitter trying to have these reductive discussions about what is good or bad,” he said. “Yet a movie is about putting your doubts and stupidity on screen. If you don’t do this, you must be a master, like Hitchcock or Bresson. I am not a master.
