Leos Carax had a problem: he wanted to incorporate a small child with preternatural singing prowess into his deranged Sparks brothers movie musical “Annette,” but the director didn’t want to use a series of actual small humans, or digital technology.
The solution? A puppet, which turned out to be perhaps the most polarizing element in an already quite polarizing musical starring Adam Driver as a sociopathic, narcissistic comedian called “The Ape of God” opposite Marion Cotillard as his soprano, opera-singing wife.
The puppet dares you not to suspend your disbelief, but to actually embrace the artifice of the piece.“The film seemed impossible to make,” Leos Carax said in a statement shared about his film.
“Then an image came to me: a tiny star, alone and lost in the dark infinite — the smallness of Annette in the face of the world.
I thought of Masha, a little girl I knew years ago in Ukraine.
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