no votes for Best Picture but rated #82, 2021 Skandies

This is a documentary about the band Sparks.  I discovered Sparks in 2011 and was amazed by the fact that here was a band that at that point had released twenty-two albums over the course of forty years, and nearly every one was in a different genre⁠—and most of them were pretty darn good!  In fact, I was so amazed that I put together a Sparks career retrospective that ran to around seven thousand words and has blown well past that mark with subsequent updates.  (In fact, I just updated it again in tandem with writing this article.)  Thus, this documentary didn’t really have that much to teach me⁠—by the time it came out, my page had already been covering a lot of the same ground for ten years.

Nevertheless, The Sparks Brothers still made for a very worth­while two and a half hours.  It’s very well made.  The content is also top-notch; the movie offers up a wealth of interesting visu­als from way back when, from shots of the teenaged brothers in the audience at a Beatles concert in 1964 to a sequence of surpri­singly hi-res student ID pictures from their years at UCLA, along with more photos than I would have expected of their stints in college bands like Moonbaker Abbey and the Urban Renewal Pro­ject.  And since this is a documentary, we get a parade of talking heads, and the lineup of guests is impressive and diverse.  The Maels cycled through a legion of backing musicians over the dec­ades, and we hear from quite a few of them: Earle Mankey, Har­ley Feinstein, Ian Hampton, Hilly Michaels, Les Bohem, Christi Haydon, Tammy Glover, and more⁠—and I see that several of these figures have left us in the handful of years since the movie came out.  We have musicians and producers who collaborated with Sparks⁠—Alex Kapranos, Roddy Bottom, Jane Wiedlin, Todd Rundgren, Giorgio Moroder⁠—and musicians who were inspired by them: Beck, Björk, Flea, and members of Duran Duran, Era­sure, New Order, Sonic Youth, and more.  Since the Maels have a penchant for funny lyrics, we also hear from comedians such as Mike Myers, Patton Oswalt, and Fred Armisen.  Bridging the last two groups, we have Weird Al.  We even get some clips of Sparks’ own inspirations commenting on them at the height of their suc­cess: Pete Townshend on a talk show chatting about Sparks with Shelley Winters of all people, and John Lennon calling up Ringo and telling him to turn on the TV because “Marc Bolan is playing a song with Adolf Hitler”.

Ultimately, the point of the movie is basically to explore the mystery of a band that has been hugely influential, that has had multiple periods of massive success in several different countries (if never any two countries at the same time!)… and that, simul­taneously, no one has ever heard of.  It’s also a paean to a band that, while certainly enjoying the success they had and the perks that came with it⁠—the Maels have big houses in the hills over­looking L.A., and we hear from some of their groupies from back in the day⁠—kept on making art for art’s sake.  That’s the thing: they’ve tried out all sorts of different sounds over the years.  Sometimes they flopped because they were radically out of step with the times, like doing sunny harmonies à la the Beach Boys right as the Sex Pistols were breaking out.  Sometimes they were ahead of their time, like becoming an ’80s synth duo in the ’70s and thereby showing all those future ’80s synth duos that this could be a thing.  And sometimes they were right on trend, like in their glam rock and new wave periods, and reaped the rewards⁠—but even then, instead of milking that success they’d go right on to the next thing.  And usually their latest batch of new fans wouldn’t follow them.

One of my takeaways was a point the movie doesn’t make⁠—that the reason that Sparks could be simultaneously legendary and obscure is that the culture also keeps going right on to the next thing.  It basically does not matter what you have done if you’re not doing it now.  Those who were there will forget, and those who weren’t there won’t be taught.  “Who is Paul McCartney?” asked thousands of mystified tweets in the 2010s.  And outside the realm of music, our cultural anterograde amnesia comes with much higher stakes.  Much of the American electorate of 2024 seemed to have no memory of 2017 to 2020.  “Hmm, this Donald Trump guy seems like a fresh face.  Let’s give him a chance!”

Ron Mael, Russell Mael, and Leos Carax, 2021
#2, 2021 Skandies

One of the first things The Sparks Brothers tells us about Ron and Russell Mael is that a lot of their formative memories are of going to the movies on Saturdays with their father, who died in 1957.  When they got to UCLA in the 1960s, they were both film majors, and the documentary describes their college experience as a matter of bouncing back and forth between practicing with their various bands and taking in the latest French New Wave films at the arthouse theaters.  Thus it should come as no sur­prise that they’ve spent significant stretches of their career try­ing to break into cinema.  After they first made it big in 1974, French director Jacques Tati wrote a script for a movie called Confusion that would have starred the Maels as American studio execs who take over a French TV station⁠—but health issues forced Tati into retirement before the film could be made.  The Maels then agreed to be showcased in the 1977 Sensurround movie Rollercoaster, which was a bomb.  A decade later, their friend Larry Wilson co-wrote the movie Beetlejuice, which turned out to be one of the hit films of 1988; as a follow-up, he proposed a collaboration with Sparks to turn the Japanese comic book Mai, the Psychic Girl into a movie musical, with Tim Burton lined up to direct.  The Maels spent six years trying to get this movie off the ground; they re­corded all the music (with Sparks’ touring percussionist Christi Haydon in the title role) but never released it, leaving a gap in their output that encompassed Nirvana’s entire career.  After Burton abandoned Mai to do The Nightmare Before Christmas, the Maels tried to get Hong Kong director Tsui Hark to take on the project, with no luck.  However, Tsui did hire Sparks to do the music for his 1998 American action movie Knock-Off, starring Jean-Claude Van Damme and Rob Schneider.  That, perhaps un­surprisingly, was another bomb, both commercially and creative­ly.  Ron Mael later said that while Tsui had initially promised that Sparks could have total creative freedom and had told them that he was looking for something groundbreaking, he knew that they were in trouble when Tsui heard their score, called them into his office, and asked, “Have you ever seen a movie before?”

Jump ahead another decade.  The higher-ups at Sweden’s nation­al broadcasting service, Sveriges Radio, had decided to commis­sion a number of original musicals.  Marie Wennersten of the radio drama department had been blown away by a Sparks con­cert she had seen in Stockholm in 2004 and thought that they would be perfect for the project.  They could do anything they wanted, she told them, so long as at least half of it was in Swe­dish and the central theme had something to do with Sweden.  Having spent so much of their youth in L.A.’s arthouse theaters watching foreign films, the Maels naturally went straight to work on a story about a grim Swedish director getting lured to Holly­wood, culminating in 2009’s The Seduction of Ingmar Bergman.  The Maels very much enjoyed that project, but discovered that they’d made a critical mistake that prevented them from being able to take it on tour: their story featured thirteen roles, so the tour logistics would be a nightmare.  The roles they’d selected for themselves were also minor: Russell played not Ingmar Bergman himself but a studio executive, and Ron played the limo driver.  So they decided to make another musical, called Annette, that would require only three performers.  Russell would actually play the main character this time and sing lead on over dozen songs instead of just a couple.  There would be one male supporting character, played by Ron.  All female roles would be sung by the de facto third Spark of this era, opera singer Rebecca Sjöwall.  In 2013, the trio recorded the piece in full; it ran for nearly two hours.  But they didn’t release it.  Something had come up.

In 2012, a French filmmaker who works under the pseudonym Leos Carax had released a film called Holy Motors which features a Sparks song (“How Are You Getting Home”, 1975) in an early scene.  Carax ran into the Maels at the Cannes Film Festival and thanked them for permission to use the song.  They got to talking about their upcoming projects⁠—Sparks were working on An­nette, and Carax was looking to make his first English-language film⁠—and by the end of the conversation, those projects were no longer separate.  Annette would be Carax’s anglophone debut.  And fifty years after releasing their first album, Sparks would finally release their first film.  Realistically, it is likely to be their only film.  Though Russell Mael jokes in The Sparks Brothers that “with advances in medical technology, hopefully there will be two to three hundred more Sparks albums”, the fact is that as I type this Ron Mael is about to turn eighty-one, and Russell will be turning seventy-eight a couple of months after that.  So with their one shot at cinematic immortality, Sparks elected to put forward… a biopic of Jordy the Singing Baby.

I try to go into the movies I watch knowing as little as possible about them, so all I knew about this one was that it was by Sparks and the Holy Motors guy and that it had won the César for best original music (and it was cheering to discover that Rus­sell Mael and I speak French with roughly the same level of flu­ency).  I watched it to the end.  And when it was over, I thought, okay, any surprises (and there are several) have had an opportu­nity to be genuinely surprising.  But music works via familiarity.  It takes a while for songs to click.  It was probably not a coinci­dence that the parts of Annette that worked best for me on my first viewing were the parts in which we hear old Sparks songs: “Rock, Rock, Rock” from 2006, “The Calm Before the Storm” from 2000, “Thanks but No Thanks” and “Bon Voyage” from 1974.  But one advantage of being five years behind on my movie list is that in 2024, Sparks did finally release the 2013 recordings, i.e., the ones performed by the band rather than by the film ac­tors; they billed it as Annette: An Opera by Sparks.  So I listened to that until I could rewatch the film as a cinematic adaptation of an opera I already knew.  And then I did rewatch it and had a very different experience.

plot spoilers
     start here The story of Annette, the original opera, is that a successful comedian named Henry McHenry and a star opera singer named Ann Romano strike up an unlikely romance.  They marry and have a baby girl, whom they name Annette.  But while Ann remains success­ful, Henry’s career hits the skids.  He becomes resentful and starts drinking heavily.  The family goes out yachting, ostensibly so that Henry and Ann can try to work on their relationship, but when a storm hits, Henry lures Ann onto the deck and then does nothing when she goes over the side.  Henry and Annette make it safely to an island, where Ann’s ghost announces that she will haunt Henry in a very specific way: henceforth, when put under a spotlight⁠—even if that spotlight is just the moon⁠—baby Annette will sing Ann’s signature aria.  But when Henry gets over his amazement at the spectacle of a singing baby, he decides that Annette is his ticket back to fame and fortune.  Enlisting the help of Ann’s former accompanist, now a successful conductor, Henry takes Annette on a world tour, where audiences on every conti­nent are spellbound by the tiny girl’s angelic voice.  His associa­tion with Annette does bring Henry money and female attention, but he remains tormented by what he’s done.  When he discovers that Annette may not be his child at all, but rather the product of a fling Ann had with the conductor before meeting Henry, Henry flies into a rage and murders the conductor⁠—but was that An­nette watching from the window?  Henry decides that Annette’s next show will be her last: she’s been booked to perform the half­time show at the Super Bowl.  But instead of singing, Annette uses her speaking voice for the first time to announce that her father is a murderer.  About to be jailed for life, Henry fantasizes about a world in which he had been happy for Ann’s success instead of succumbing to murderous envy.

As a story, that’s probably not going to win too many awards.  But it’s not a standalone story.  It’s a frame on which to hang songs.  And since most of what I am going to write about the cinematic version of Annette is going to be positive, I should get this out of the way: my score for this movie is going to end up in the mixed range because lead actor Adam Driver is not in the same universe as Russell Mael as a singer.  In general, this is not my kind of music, and I was relieved when Sparks’ genre-hop­ping ways led them from musical theater back to rock in the mid-2010s, but I liked the Annette opera more than I didn’t, and there are two main reasons: the melodies are catchy, and Russell Mael sings them well.  So to see so many of those songs reduced to a few bars Adam Driver warbles under his breath for fifteen seconds was disappointing.  Why did he get cast?  His perfor­mance seems to have been fueled by the gallons of acting juice he gulped down before each take, particularly in the Las Vegas scene, so if that’s what you want to see, he’s a good choice.  I highly doubt that a digitally de-aged Russell Mael could have act­ed the part of Henry McHenry better than Driver.  But I feel like, in a work like Annette, the singing sort of takes the place of more traditional acting, so of the two Henrys, I found Russell’s more effective.  They should have cast a singer.

adaptation spoilers
    start here The first major change we see to the ori­ginal opera is that, in place of the songs “I Got a Lot in Common with Dosto­evsky” and “Girls Love a Man Who Makes Them Laugh”, Henry’s career as a comedian is established by showing us extended sequences of his act, which seems oddly bereft of comedy.  It reminded me a little of the act of the Steve Buscemi character in Martin Scor­sese’s “Life Lessons”, the one who prompts this dialogue:

Lionel: Who in their right mind would leave you?  Who is this guy?  I know ’im, right?

Paulette: Gregory Stark.

Lionel: That kid?  The comedian?

Paulette: A performance artist.

Lionel: “Performance artist.”  What the hell is a perfor­mance artist?  A person is an actor, a singer, a dancer!

When we see Gregory Stark’s act, though, we see why Paulette objected to Lionel calling him a comedian, because he’s not tell­ing jokes exactly.  He struts around a set of abandoned subway tracks repurposed into a stage, delivering a monologue that eli­cits a few incidental laughs from the audience now and then but contains no real punchlines.  And the same is true for Henry McHenry in Annette.  He paces around a smoky stage in a terry­cloth bathrobe, muttering darkly for a bit and then pulling some sort of performance-art stunt: at one stop he announces his en­gagement to Ann and then stages his own assassination, and at another he acts out a scenario in which he kills Ann.  Comedy!

In between these performances is the couple’s honeymoon peri­od with its keystone song “We Love Each Other So Much”; this is sung by Driver and lead actress Marion Cotillard, and since Cotillard is not actually an opera singer like Sjöwall, the song has been changed from an operatic duet to a showtune that pivots into a rock song halfway through, a significant upgrade despite Driver’s vocals.  (Cotillard’s vocals are clearly non-professional but fairly decent.  Her character, incidentally, has had her sur­name changed from Romano to Defrasnoux, as she is now played by a French actress in a film by a French director; why her first name is still “Ann” and not “Anne” is a mystery to me.)  We also get introduced to the character of the conductor, played by a sit­com actor named Simon Hedberg, whose rendition of “I’m an Accompanist” also comes soaked in acting juice, which I’m not sure is actually an improvement over Ron Mael’s sprechgesang in the 2013 recording.

We hit a big change at the forty-minute mark, as unlike the opera, the movie includes a full scene depicting Annette’s birth, complete with its own song written for the film.  This scene in­troduces one of the film’s primary innovations: how it will deal with the fact that, unlike an audio recording, it actually has to show its title character.  It’s a heck of a thing: the baby is deli­vered, we hear a cry, the newborn is passed around in silhouette, we chuckle to ourselves that the filmmakers didn’t do a great job of disguising that the “baby” is just a doll… and then the lights get brighter, and we discover that they’re not actually trying to disguise it at all.  Newborn Annette very clearly has ball joints and hinges, even visible screws.  And so does baby Annette.  And toddler Annette.  The movie just uses slightly larger dolls in each scene⁠—and there’s no stop-motion or computer animation here, just conventional puppetry.  I guess that if the mother’s name is Ann, and the daughter’s name is Annette, then it’s only logical that if the mother is played by an actress named Marion, the daughter should be played by a marionette.

Almost immediately we get another new song, a six-part opera piece: #MeToo happened in between the original recordings and the making of the film, so a scene is added in which half a dozen women accuse Henry of abuse in his past relationships.  Not long thereafter, Ann gets a new spotlight song which segues into a lovely bonding moment with Annette in which (as noted above) she sings her the opening to Sparks’ 1974 song “Thanks but No Thanks”, which takes on a whole new literal and emotional meaning in its new context.  The idea is to make Ann register as a more complete character prior to her demise, and to establish Henry as an outright villain and not just an edgelord.  It’s in this section that a lot of Russell Mael’s showcase songs from the opera get sacrificed: “You Used to Laugh”, “My Star’s in De­cline”, “I’m a Good Father”, and others either get overacted or whittled down to virtually nothing.  But in tandem with these disappointments comes a musical choice, which was apparently Carax’s call, that pretty much saves the movie.

See, the whole story revolves around the idea that a worldwide mania breaks out over Annette the Singing Baby.  And she only has the one song: Ann’s aria.  So, y’know, that better be pretty fuckin’ good for this story to work at all.  And it is!  I can totally believe that the Maels came up with this melody and built this entire project around it.  But in the opera, Rebecca Sjöwall plays both Ann and Annette.  So Annette’s version sounds exactly like Ann’s, just without words.  But Carax had his people scout for an actual little girl to sing this song⁠—and they found Hebe Griffiths.  And yeah⁠—the film really tries to sell the miracle of Annette the Singing Baby by having her song allow her to levitate off the stage while starlight glitters around her, but the song itself has to do most of the heavy lifting, and… and I guess I take back what I wrote above about giving this movie a middling score, because despite its other faults, how can I not give a positive review to a movie with these two minutes on the soundtrack?

I mean, I’ll probably look back on this article at some point in the future and wonder why I went so overboard about this.  It’s been a tough year and maybe I’m a little more fragile than usual.  But I just clicked this to see whether the Youtube embed was working properly, and when the song was over I broke into one of those ten-second sobbing fits that I sometimes get when I read Zot!.

Some of that is probably because I now know where the movie ends up going.  For a while it tracks the opera closely.  Toward the end it starts to diverge: we lose the Rebecca Sjöwall show­case “Too Operatic”, one of the highlights of the original recor­dings, and Adam Driver cannot carry off the big finale, “Step­ping Back in Time”.  But in the movie, that’s not the big finale.  Carax had Sparks write a new scene, and song, to finish off the film version, and they are both doozies.  I want to go into the new ending in some depth because I didn’t really process it the first time I watched Annette, so the second time around, my jaw dropped further and further as I put the pieces together and realized what I was watching.

So Henry has been convicted of murder, and now he’s in prison.  The pink mark on his jawline has grown into a disfiguring purple stain taking up a fair chunk of the right side of his face.  It’s a big day for Henry as he waits in the visitation room for his daughter to arrive.  A prison guard carries the largest of the marionettes down the hall, and this is not the monkey-faced two-year-old from some of the earlier scenes: while her ears still stick out a bit, this version of the Annette doll has the face of a schoolgirl, a mane of long red hair, and stylish clothing, including a striking ascot.  We see some of the film’s most sophisticated puppetry yet as Annette settles into her chair.  “You’ve changed so much, An­nette,” Henry says.  “Yes,” says a distant voice.  Henry looks up⁠—

—⁠and standing against the back wall, wearing the exact same clothes as the doll, is a real human child.  This is the fourth of the four actors to appear in the movie’s opening credits: Devyn McDowell, age five.  She approaches the table and stands behind her wooden doppergänger.  In the next shot, she has replaced it in the chair.  She and Henry exchange some awkward small talk, and then Henry begins to sing.  Though Adam Driver’s voice isn’t any better than in any other scene, this time the movie doesn’t underplay the song: he belts out three verses, which takes a minute and forty seconds⁠—

—⁠and then little Annette takes the fourth verse.  She doesn’t sound like an angel this time.  She sounds like a kindergartener having a tantrum.  Her first line: “I’LL NEVER SING AGAIN!”  The first time I saw this, I was just trying to get a sense of what was happening⁠—okay, this is the big Pinocchio moment, and real-girl Annette is angry at Henry for ruining her life when it had barely even begun, murdering her mother and the man who might have been her real father… but I wasn’t really catching many of the lyrics, so I didn’t get much more than that.  I mean, it’s an incred­ibly impressive scene, because just as the puppetry was not faked, neither was this song.  Nothing was dubbed, nothing was recorded in a studio: sure, it may have taken a few takes, but ul­timately, we are hearing a five-year-old girl singing a complicated contrapuntal duet with Adam Driver, live.  Just, wow.  But on my second viewing, I actually started to piece together the meaning of the song.  One line jumped out at me: “Will I ever forgive Mom?”

That takes Henry by surprise as well.  “No, don’t blame Ann,” he sings, taken aback.  Me, I was mystified.  Ann was a murder vic­tim!  How could she possibly bear any of the blame?  I went back and listened to the verse again, blocking out Henry’s lines and focusing on Annette’s: “Will I ever forgive Mom? / Her deadly poison I became / Merely a child to exploit!”  And it finally clicked: “Through Annette I’ll haunt you,” a vision of a drowned Ann had sung.  “Her voice will be my ghost.”  But Annette didn’t want to be her mother’s ghost.  She wanted to be herself.  Oh no, oh no.  This poor baby.  And, oh, the shot with Henry and Annette in profile, eye to eye, a haggard adult man on the left, a tiny child like one of Ellie’s little preschoolers on the right, as she righ­teously snarls at him, with no cuts, “Why should I now forgive?  Why should I now forget?  I can never forgive!  I can never forget!  Both of you were using me for your own ends, for your own ends!  Not an ounce of shame!  The two of you, you’re both to blame!  I wish that both of you were gone!” 

And still reeling from this, I went back after the movie was over to try to catch another verse: “I’LL NEVER SING AGAIN!”, An­nette had declared, but there were more lines after that.  “I’LL NEVER SING AGAIN!  Shunning all lights at night!  I’ll never sing again, smashing every lamp I see!  I’ll never sing again, living in full darkness!  I’ll never sing again, a vampire forever!”  Oh no, oh no, oh no.  Why does Annette have to shun the light and smash the lamps?  Because Ann’s revenge was that Annette would sing when lights shone on her.  Annette wasn’t moved to song by the sight of the moon or the lamp Henry got her that projected stars onto her walls⁠—she was compelled to sing by… by what I can now only call a curse.  Annette never wanted to sing.  And now if she wants to be free from the curse, she has to spend her life in the dark.  This movie seemed so goofy on the surface, but this is ser­ious horror!  There’s something I can’t bear about that very pri­mal “she didn’t want this”.  There’s some overlap with the aspect of euthanizing our cat Ollie that still has me fucked up months later.  I came ugly-crying to Ellie about it the next day: the awful sound he made when the vet jabbed him with the morphine shot.  “He didn’t like the needle,” I bawled to her.  I wouldn’t mind it nearly as much it if it were a vaccine or something, but this was different.  The last thing that ever happened to him was something he didn’t want.  Something he audibly protested.  And I made that happen.  I may never be able to cope with that thought.

But Annette gets her own revenge on Henry that hurts more than Ann’s.  I see that I left a detail out of my plot summary that turns out to be important: what exactly causes Henry to fly into a rage and kill the conductor.  The conductor tries to teach Annette a second song, namely, “We Love Each Other So Much”.  Henry bellows that that song was his and Ann’s special song, and the conductor had no right to teach it to Annette, but the conductor reveals that he wrote it back when he was with Ann.  And he had every right to teach his own song to a girl who might actually be the product of that love, brief as it may have been.  Now it turns out that five-year-old Annette remembers the song.  Except when she sings it to Henry, she changes the words a bit.  “Now you have nothing to love,” she murmurs to him.  Henry gapes at her, alarmed.  “Why can’t I love you?” he asks with panic in his voice.  “Can’t I love you?”  Annette’s reply, sung to a tune we have come to know well: “No, not really, Daddy⁠—it’s sad but it’s true.  Now you have nothing to love.”   She goes, leav­ing Henry looking like a shuffling corpse.  And the movie closes with a shot of the Annette marionette on the floor.

And I’m sure that this was obvious to everyone else, but only this time did I finally get why this was the final shot.  Annette wasn’t played by a marionette for 93% of the movie because the budget was too low for CGI, or because real toddlers are hard to direct, or because Leos Carax is quirky.  She was played by a puppet be­cause her parents treated her like a puppet.  And the one glimmer of light in what is otherwise an exceedingly dark ending is that at least Annette has left her days as a puppet behind.  It’s kind of amazing how this changed my perspective on earlier scenes.  Be­cause I hadn’t thought of Annette as a real person.  I’d thought of her as a plot device.  Even as a human baby she wouldn’t have had a lot of agency, but she wasn’t even that⁠—she was a contrap­tion made of resin and wood.  But on a third watch, I could read the doll as a representation of Annette, an icon for her.  As such, even her carved expressions felt more real.  Because now I could feel that the tormented little girl from the last scene was in there somewhere.  Maybe not in the way that a driver is inside a car.  But maybe in the way that a statue is inside a block of marble.

“When You’re a French Director” (Sparks ft. Leos Carax, 2017)

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