Annette
Leos Carax, 15, 141min
★★
“He does sort of look like the original man,” said someone of Adam Driver’s character in Girls, and it never seemed more true than it does in Leos Carax’s wild, loony, grand-folly musical, Annette. Driver plays Henry McHenry, a misanthropic stand-up comedian who performs a one-man show called “The Ape of God”. Wearing a hooded green bathrobe, like Robert De Niro in Raging Bull, swinging his microphone at the audience like Lenny Bruce, he paces the stage while delivering belligerent comic rants about blow jobs and the gas chambers. “So why did you become a comedian?” ask the audience, in chorus. “It’s the only way I know how to tell the truth without getting killed,” he