The trail­er for Leos Carax’s musi­cal Annette has arrived at long last

Though uncer­tain­ty still reigns in a Europe con­tin­u­ing to strug­gle with the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic and the vac­ci­na­tion effort to quell it, the Cannes Film Fes­ti­val is mov­ing ahead undaunt­ed. With a few months’ delay to a July open­ing, they’ll soon mount a 2021 iter­a­tion of their pro­gram, and they’ve begun announc­ing titles to prove it.

Though includ­ed in the batch of selec­tions announced last year by Cannes as the ​‘We Would Have Pre­miered It If We Could’ slate, Wes Ander­son​’s lat­est film The French Dis­patch will open on the banks of the Croisette this sum­mer. But today’s big news con­cerns the oth­er con­firmed pick for this year’s fes­tiv­i­ties – Leos Carax​’s long-delayed, long-antic­i­pat­ed musi­cal Annette, which received its first trail­er this morning.

The French bound­ary-break­er hasn’t appeared at the Palais in near­ly a decade, since his uni­ver­sal­ly-acclaimed Holy Motors took the prom­e­nade by storm in 2012. He appears to be pulling out all the stops for his Eng­lish-lan­guage debut, mount­ing a real­ist-fan­ta­sy of fam­i­ly and fate with sur­re­al inter­ludes and ambi­tious pro­duc­tion numbers.

Adam Dri­ver leads the cast as a stand-up come­di­an mad­ly in love with a world-famous sopra­no (Mar­i­on Cotil­lard, tak­ing over for the ini­tial­ly cast Rooney Mara), their life togeth­er com­pli­cat­ed by the arrival of their baby girl Annette. The child pos­sess­es some fash­ion of super­nat­ur­al pow­er, which places her in a larg­er-than-life dra­ma involv­ing a con­duc­tor (Simon Hel­berg), anoth­er singer (Bel­gian chanteuse Angèle, tak­ing over in a role once held by Rihan­na), orig­i­nal music from the band Sparks, a the­atri­cal night on the stormy seas, jail time, and crowds of cheer­ing fans.

The trail­er clar­i­fies lit­tle, though that’s pre­cise­ly how Carax fans would like it, pre­fer­ring to allow his strange and mys­te­ri­ous films to open up in their own time. It won’t be long now, with the film sched­uled to open Cannes the first week of July, the same day it will go wide to cin­e­mas across France. The movies are return­ing – nature is return­ing.

Annette will debut at Cannes and in French the­aters on 6 July.