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diamonds wrote: Mon Apr 19, 2021 12:23 pm Leos Carax's Annette

There is a god!

Annette's French release date is in July per the trailer, but articles from today also mention that Amazon has U.S. distribution rights and is planning a late summer theatrical release in the states

Annette will get a limited release in theatres in the U.S. August 6, and drop on Amazon Prime August 20

therewillbeblus wrote: Thu May 20, 2021 12:41 pm Annette will get a limited release in theatres in the U.S. August 6, and drop on Amazon Prime August 20

The trailer makes it look like something that really should be seen on the big screen, but I'm very thankful it's going to come out on Prime, since it has zero chance of getting released here (and there aren't even any festivals close to its release date) and I'd rather not wait months to watch it at home

Pavel wrote: Thu May 20, 2021 7:16 pm

therewillbeblus wrote: Thu May 20, 2021 12:41 pm Annette will get a limited release in theatres in the U.S. August 6, and drop on Amazon Prime August 20

The trailer makes it look like something that really should be seen on the big screen, but I'm very thankful it's going to come out on Prime, since it has zero chance of getting released here (and there aren't even any festivals close to its release date) and I'd rather not wait months to watch it at home

Our comments neatly encapsulate the pros and cons of streaming, I guess.

On the one hand, whether you live in Philadelphia or Punxsutawney, you'll be able to see it in late August.

On the other hand, very few folks will be able to see it on the big screen -- especially if it only plays for a week in five or six "major cities," as is often the case lately. Personally, I'd prefer that a film get released on more screens and more people have a chance to see it that way, even if it means anyone not near an arthouse has to wait a bit longer. (Back in the day, you'd often have to wait for many months if not years to see the latest import at your local arthouse.)

Personally, I rather dislike watching new movies at home, if only because seeing them in that environment -- with all the usual distractions of home, the smaller screen, etc. -- seems to diminish them, and my connection to them. I just can't give myself over to a movie the same way at home. If there's a movie I really want to see, I really want to see it in the theater if at all possible. When I lived outside of a major metro area, I'd sometimes drive pretty far to see stuff. I understand that not everyone wants to -- or can, for any number of reasons -- do that. But personally, although I do watch plenty of old movies at home (mostly old ones that are never coming to the theater) , if theaters stop being a major destination for movies, and it becomes impossible to see new movies that way, I don't really feel like I have much connection to "cinema" anymore. (Maybe this belongs in a different thread....)

I'm with you, and although it may not be a fair counterpoint to this ethos to compare with the low-bar set by other studios, isn't Dune going straight to HBO Max right alongside any theatrical release, in addition to the whole WB slate? I never thought I'd say it, but it appears that Amazon/Netflix are actually coming out looking kinda good now that they have imposed restrictions for Oscar-qualifying runs while the direct-to-streaming HBO Max deal in the wake of Covid doesn't really need to be as cognizant. Unless I'm missing something. Having said that, I feel like Amazon has always been better than Netflix about prioritizing their theatrical releases, often months ahead of streaming, and that was before the outcry of Netflix not doing this came to light (i.e. Paterson, Manchester by the Sea both had theatrical screenings way before dropping free on Prime for members). Although I live in the Boston area and am fortunate enough to have multiple independent theatres getting these movies, I recall several Prime indies getting wide releases at the megaplexes all the way back to the start of Amazon distributing ~half a decade ago

I imagine I'd be all for films playing exclusively in theaters if local distributors didn't (perhaps correctly) assume that audiences here only want to watch big-budget spectacle, sequels to popular films, shitty horrors or random animation, thereby making streaming my only option to watch everything else without waiting. I have a friend whose job is to decide which films get a theatrical release here, and despite my begging he's rejected most everything that interests me because he doesn't find it commercially viable (it's his fault I had to watch The Lighthouse at home in December). Except when sometimes he, for whatever reason, decides some random film virtually nobody seems excited about should get released.
I got used to watching films at home in 2020, but there are plenty of examples I can name of films that didn't quite have the same impact on me on repeat viewings entirely because of the screen decreasing in size.
Occasionally we do get something a bit earlier than bigger markets like the US — Dune comes out in September here and will have roughly a month long theatrical run before it comes out in America and on HBO

therewillbeblus wrote: Thu May 20, 2021 12:41 pm Annette will get a limited release in theatres in the U.S. August 6, and drop on Amazon Prime August 20

Would make a great double feature with The Sparks Brothers

Annette

After a difficult year withdrawing from regular trips to the movie theatres, I was ready to declare the rebirth of cinema as a film I've been looking forward to for years, by one of my favorite commercially-neglected auteurs, finally arrived. I entered the screening fully aware that it would be a disorganized mesh of Carax's emotional and mental incongruities, and yet I still found myself continually shocked by the uneven pacing, unexpected postures at humor, and raw sincerity often toned-down to a stagnant pulse at just the moments where most musicals take off into the clouds. This film could prove to be divisive even amongst Carax fans, and there were certainly moments where I had my doubts about its genius, but I came away mesmerized and in awe of Carax's self-exposure, in some ways identifying on a deeper level than I have with his other work. I don't mean to say that this is Carax's magnum opus; it's not, though time will tell how it ranks amongst the other masterpieces in his oeuvre, but he is digging deeper into his own psychological abyss, fearlessly and fearfully but incapable of withholding himself from himself. As much as it is a rebirth of cinema, this project also marks the stain of death for Carax’s fatalistic bind to self-destruction, self-love, and the need to love and be loved in and by every conceivable -and inconceivable- incarnation.

This is exactly as messily conflicted in form as Carax's first three masterpieces, a discharge of soul from a man pleading to 'matter' with supremacy, out of a desperate wish-fulfillment for significance whilst knowing his flaws only too well. It’s a film that tells you that Carax’s life, mind, and heart are constantly pulsating with fervent ache for ‘more’, an expression of the will to hide from judgment but also be judged because to be 'honed in on' is a cheap verification of worth; and yet Annette also rests in limbo without absolutist scrutiny for the spirit’s unstoppable drive to be seen.

If La La Land was a mainstream homage to The Young Girls of Rochefort, then Annette is the gonzo answer to The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, both modern musicals centering around L.A. artist-couples yet totally divergent in flavor. Carax's film at times resembles Dancer in the Dark's approach to the musical, only for scarred, rather than golden, hearts. It's an anti-musical of sorts: Most of the songs don't occur in lavished numbers and reinforce the limitations of language, expectedly on-brand for Carax's turmoil stemming from ineffable expressions of love. The lyrics are frequently banal, planted facts that work against the friction of the musical number's fantastical safe space of self-actualization where words belted in a certain tone can cathartically declare truth. Here it's the opposite: Driver and Cotillard's personal relationship ballad, "We Love Each Other So Much", quite literally states that they are in love and that they cannot explain it; even in song as lovers they are unable to communicate the 'why'- in what is both the most comically subversive song in the film and also surprisingly emerges as its most devastating.

Whether songs center around heckling or birth, the words could be said without music and retain a mundane realism (some exceptions exist, namely the finale's duet), but while Carax comprehends the obstacles to phonic cleansing, he implements unpredictable visuals and odd emphases in musical-intrusions to evoke the restlessness of Driver. His compulsive patting of his pregnant wife in bed throughout the night as he cannot sleep encapsulates Carax's own hate/love relationship with having dense passion for another person and himself simultaneously. Driver's surrender to a "powerlessness" to save his wife or protect the conductor from himself in two key scenes is expressed with an unconvincing "there's nothing I can do," when Carax knows full-well that this is a dishonest self-fulfilling prophecy that translates to a lack of willingness to face his defective characteristics. At least he does now, objectively removed from the situation, but he retains great pathos meditating on his pervasive flaws, unable to transcend them with maturation as a late-act submission to 'time' indicates.

As par for the course, Driver's Henry McHenry is a disclosure of Carax's narcissism-run-riot. It's all about him. His audience unconditionally loves him, asks him why he became a comedian, peddling to his every thought as the star of his own movie; but he's also front-and-center when he's being booed by the masses, or haunted by ghosts, or persecuted by authorities. He professes that he's a great father when he buys a cute gift for Annette, but Carax doesn't shy away from the exploitative parts- calling them out directly and dropping subtler hints of Driver's egocentricity: When he announces Annette as the star of a program, he then introduces himself, but only repeats his name twice- just as his full name is hilariously a duplicate of his first name, and he's conveniently the only character who has a full name mentioned. He's twice as important as everyone else in the self-absorbed movie of his own life, and would probably not stop there if legal names were traditionally longer. These examples are as notable admissions of self-importance as his stage name, The Ape of God, which reflects his id-heavy barbarism and solipsistic vanity. Henry is, as they say, an 'egomaniac with an inferiority complex'. His negative core beliefs of being unlovable are persistent but coexist with an unrelenting impetus to be recognized as superior.

Spoiler

There is another reading where Annette is God, or at least a secondary God to Henry that causes him great strain due to the incompatibility of two Gods occupying the same space. Parents say that once their child is born, it suddenly becomes the most important thing to them, so naturally for someone so self-centered this would cause quite the existential crisis! Carax doesn't simplify this though- Annette is not a clear threat to Henry but a nebulous reminder that he may not be as important to others, or even to himself, as another part of him strongly needs to be. And what about Henry, and the world's, preoccupation with her singing? Is this enigma the only 'honest' expression in such a vapid culture and clichéd milieu of recycled experience, and thus sought after in wonder? Does Henry authentically want her to be 'seen' just as he does, because he loves her, but cannot separate from his God complex- or is he really just exploiting her for himself? Can't it be both?

The opening number is as comically self-reflexive to cinema as the closing number is tragically self-reflexive to Carax’s own demons, in a manner that surpasses even his most self-criticizing and helpless past regurgitations. If the film is a series of theatrical demonstrations of people hiding behind defensive acts, the ending is working counter to that operatic mold, diluted from spectacle just as Henry/Carax's psyche (and home) is broken down. The finale that follows is the best scene in the film, and what could be ostensibly read as Carax's suicide note. Driver's appearance directly transforms into Carax (with a replica of his facial hair pattern and exact staple haircut) as he locks himself away, powerless over the 'abyss' this far into his life. Puppet Annette 'becomes' real, or could he only see her as an object before, delusionally unable to access this real person to love more than himself? As Henry gives Annette advice about not venturing into the abyss, and to forgive Ann as the child blames them both in equal measure, is he finally achieving a shred of selflessness or humility, only a little too late? Or is this another subconscious defensive refusal to part from self-obsession through self-deprecation or self-pity; another impulsive grasp at the spotlight to be the center of attention- the sole culprit, the martyred sage advice-provider, desperate to offer something, to matter most in any respect, with the bar stopping there sans conditions based on standards.

Is Carax’s “stop looking at me” command and subsequent shielding of his face in the corner a declaration that he cannot get out of his own way, and that the only method to actually surrender and cut himself away from grandiose pining is to literally cut away from his surrogate, to hide from cinema, from people, to die? His daughter tells him that he cannot 'love' in prison- is Carax only safe from himself and others if locked away from his unbridled self, from smoking, drinking, and loving? This film is a pronounced artistic confession, and whether or not Carax actually murdered anyone or is submitting to guilt over #metoo crimes, he is metaphorically purging himself and also acknowledging that he cannot expel the spirits that haunt him, even if no external force will hold him accountable. Maybe he needs that, craves it, just as he needs and craves an external being to love him, and for him to love.

Carax's relationship with enigmatic forces as secure constraints and liberating madness is complicated to say the least. Love, or more appropriately "passion," has always been Carax's God, the higher power that infuriates and inspires him, that destroys and revitalizes him, that he cannot live with or live without. What does the final shot onto the now-expired Annette, motionlessly lying on the ground, signify? Hope that Carax can begin to alleviate parts of himself from the abyss of self and leave this rigidly ignorant part behind, or a fatalistic yielding that it’s too late for him? The birthmark on his neck has grown, he has just drained every spark from his expressive capacity with "Sympathy for the Abyss" and failed to extricate pain or gain interpersonal harmony, and exhausted, Carax can only say goodnight.

I went into this hoping that the Cannes and Amazon exposure would aid Carax in making another film sooner than a decade, but now I'm not so sure. Of course I selfishly want him to receive the necessary supports to actively create forever, but these artistic expulsions clearly take all of Carax's energy out of him, and going by Annette's finish, I'm not so sure he'd survive another. At the start of the film, Carax jokingly commanded us to hold our breath until the finish, before marching his cast and crew towards the narrative where these players would artificially construct his emotional turbulence. By the end we realize (or for those of us who've seen The Lovers on the Bridge recently, we 'remember') that Carax is the one holding his breath every time he dares to formulate and release his bottomless introspective processing from his mental void onto tangible celluloid. That concrete form is an illusion, though, when he's trapped in the abyss.

I almost feel intimidated to write about my response to "Annette" after therewillbeblus' enthusiastic defence of the film. To be brief: I indeed think it's a mess with occasional moments of pure cinematic genius: the opening sequence especially, and also the sequence of Annette's final (non-)performance (the latter mostly because of the incredible visuals). But the film has unnecessary lengths (do we really need to see Henry's stage act several times, and if so, must it be shown so extensively?), and while Driver's character comes to life in a rather convincing though dislikeable way, Cotillard's screen time is far too short to leave much of an impression. One could argue that this is exactly the point and perhaps necessary to highlight Henry's self-centredness, but his character would have needed a real counterpart in order to be more than an ultimately uninteresting ruthless egomaniac who uses even his own child as a puppet (literally) to achieve his glory.

Not just in this respect, but also visually I was occasionally reminded of both "The Red Shoes" and "Vox Lux" (much more than of the often-mentioned "Dancer in the Dark"), but "Annette" never reaches the emotional intensity of these three films, and with all its seriousness it has a curious kind of detachment totally unlike, say, "Les amants de Pont-Neuf", yet at the same time it doesn't treat its subject with the irony it would have deserved. I'm mentioning this latter point especially because I don't buy into therewillbeblus' interpretation that this is, ultimately, all about Carax' own life problems. And the reason is simple: it's the only feature film of his that he didn't write himself. Instead, "Annette" was written years ago by the Mael Brothers with the idea of a possible stage show, which didn't come to fruition. So it was by no means written with a film version or with Carax in mind. And if you look at the substance of the songs and the lyrics, it's actually quite typical for Sparks' work in general: treating serious topics with a boulevardesque over-the-topness and brilliantly satiric lyrics, thus making the cardhouse tumble down. The above-mentioned (non-)lyrics of "We Love Each Other So Much" are a perfect example, not just with respect to what follows. I guess it would have worked brilliantly as a broadway show.

And here is where I think the problems of the film come from: Carax takes everything far too seriously and puts more weight on this rather conventional story than the plot or the script can bear. But if Carax took Sparks' script and music only to turn the film into some sort of self-portrait: well, even Lars von Trier showed more humour in this respect with "The House That Jack Built" (but that's another film where I don't fully believe in the director=character equation, though it's far more likely there in my view). Given the Maels' script, I think Carax really missed the point. The final sequence to me doesn't come across as Henry finally understanding what he did, but just as more 'superficial whining' (okay, by that time I was probably so annoyed with Driver's character that I didn't do Annette's transformation into a 'live' person full justice).

I don't want to be over-critical, as there are some fantastic moments scattered all through the film, and the music is excellent. Carax or Sparks fans should definitely see this, but well, I don't think it's anywhere near the best of Carax' work.

I was surprised at how visually unfocused it felt, too. Carax (at least in the two other films of his I’ve seen) is excellent at mood-setting and atmosphere-building, but most of this film felt flat in a non-deliberate way. There are exceptions: the yacht sequence, the second time we meet the conductor. But for every one of those there’s a terrible news segment or stand-up comedy routine that falls on its face. And while I’ll admit to finding Sparks’s approach to melody…oblique at times, the lyrics really bothered me here. They’ve got none of the band’s trademark wit and are essentially sung narration — which could be fine in a full-blown opera or operetta, so I’m baffled as to why the film wasn’t sung all the way through. (Especially because you’ve got an in-film excuse in Ann’s work.)

Agreed that it’s simultaneously too long and not quite deep enough, especially with Ann’s character. Lots of the first act could have been cut with little consequence.

All fair points, though I’m convinced Carax contributed to the script/used film language to draw a confessional self-portrait (yet again)- and yeah, I agree that the end is simultaneously an instance of self-perceived growth by Carax as Driver the character in the moment, but framed with a sense of objectivity by Carax who, with space from being in that moment, also knows full well it’s another delusional example of him making himself the center of attention, unable to get out of his own way. I think Ann’s character is thin by design and the long-winded standup routines (which I agree are a bit much and disengaged me too) are Carax’s inclusion - more examples of his inability to refrain from inserting himself with self-flagellation for his defects of character. It’s totally fair to see these scenes as sloppy and off-putting but I think they work within the whole picture’s tone/ethos, even if I have the same negative feelings about them isolated from the rest. The ending though, is 100% Carax- regardless that the song is written by the Sparks, the trajectory it takes is so fitting to Carax’s previous expressions of his emotionally fractured relationship with his identity that the entire film earns a simultaneous autobiographical reading, though certainly a collaborative one. It can be both personal to the Sparks and Carax in their respective ways.

I enjoyed this, but at the same time

Oh for the days when I was young and naive! I once thought that it was impossible to make a completely wretched film that featured Marion Cotillard. Then two weeks ago at the Landmark on Pico Blvd in LA I learned that maybe ALL things are possible in life. I didn't stay around for the finish and I hope Marion didn't either.

However, my nomination for Best Short Film of the Year is whatever they started to play as my wife and I took our seats. It had a really catchy tune and looked like it was shot not too far from where we live. And go figure: this short film had Marion Cotillard in it!

Unfortunately, the short film ended and then the main feature started.

Tommaso wrote: Sun Aug 22, 2021 4:31 pm it's the only feature film of his that he didn't write himself. Instead, "Annette" was written years ago by the Mael Brothers with the idea of a possible stage show, which didn't come to fruition. So it was by no means written with a film version or with Carax in mind.

He didn't write Pola X either (which this resembles in many ways), or at least it was adapted from Melville, but its hard not to draw parallels between the characters and events in Pola X and well-documented incidents from Carax's own life. Same with this. Obviously, playing the autobiog/a clef game is always a bit hazardous. I read somewhere (though I don't recall where) that Carax was at first reluctant to take on this project as he feared people would make too many comparisons between the Maels' story and his own life. Of course, he doesn't help matters by featuring his own daughter and dedicating the film to her. And a few people have suggested that Driver has been made to resemble Carax in the final scenes (don't QUITE see it myself, but I can be convinced).

kubelkind wrote: Mon Aug 23, 2021 10:52 am And a few people have suggested that Driver has been made to resemble Carax in the final scenes (don't QUITE see it myself, but I can be convinced).

Have you seen a recent picture of Carax? Driver's haircut is identical, the same shades of grey, and the facial hair is pretty close I believe as well. He doesn't have the hand tattoo, that's about it.

Carax, although IIRC he doesn't take a screen credit, apparently worked with Sparks extensively on their story and screenplay, such that the final product is, by everybody's admission, quite different from whatever the Maels brought to the director. It's not hard to imagine that this process involved Carax pushing the story in an autobiographal direction. That's apart from all the little details (the cameos by Carax and his daughter, the dedication, the resemblance of Driver's character to Carax -- including haircut, tattoos, chain smoking, etc.) that, as with similar elements in Holy Motors, seem like bright neon signs to audiences (and critics) instructing them to read the film at least partly autobiographically. It's not hard to be a little cynical about all this, since Carax knows as well as anyone that an autobiographical element is critics' bait, and the stamping of a film with "directorial signatures" can be a cheap, or at least corny, marketing tactic -- think of John Woo's doves. One could see the flagrant autobiographical indexing as evidence of inspiration, or as evidence of exhaustion.

It's interesting that folks here wish the film had more "irony," because Carax has said that's precisely the aspect of the Maels' original treatment that he didn't relate to. He says he pushed them to make the screenplay more emotionally direct. As someone who likes much of Sparks's music but who often finds their ironic wit to be easily exhausted (and, as in the recent Edgar Wright documentary, overpraised), I suspect I should be grateful for this. The emotional extravagance of Annette was probably its most refreshing and endearing quality.

I really don't think I have my head around the movie enough to say much more than that (besides, it was difficult to watch the film in a cinema, N95s securely fitted to our faces, without being a little preoccupied). I did feel like I missed some of the visual and aural density of Carax's pre-digital films—the arrogant viruosity that meant that every few seconds, scenes were exploded by some astonishing trouvaille. It's impossible to imagine anyone else making this movie (though for the first time I felt like I caught affinities with David Lynch, especially in some of the selfconsciously artifical digital and practical effects), but parts of it felt... almost normal.

Or maybe I'm just older and more jaded. I'd be really curious what younger people with no knowledge of Carax's films -- as in, most of Adam Driver's obsessive fans -- think of it. The Rotten Tomatoes "audience score," for whatever that's worth, is respectable, and higher than its "tomatometer" score (I gagged a little typing that).

All of Carax's (best) films are semi-autobiographical regarding the same self-critical, filterless musicalesque-bursts of emotional turmoil, so I have a hard time buying a cynical projection that Carax is inserting himself to chase critical praise. Rather, it's the only path Carax can possibly bring himself to take to become passionate about helming a project. His own Sisyphean conflict of self is integral to motivate his energy on whatever he's working on, whether it was rooted in the Maels' minds or not, and that can be read as cynical (and Carax might even partly agree!)

pistolwink wrote: Tue Aug 24, 2021 9:57 pm It's interesting that folks here wish the film had more "irony," because Carax has said that's precisely the aspect of the Maels' original treatment that he didn't relate to. He says he pushed them to make the screenplay more emotionally direct. As someone who likes much of Sparks's music but who often finds their ironic wit to be easily exhausted (and, as in the recent Edgar Wright documentary, overpraised), I suspect I should be grateful for this. The emotional extravagance of Annette was probably its most refreshing and endearing quality.

I'm 100% down with this comment, both in regard to Sparks and in what it's saying about the film. I was quite unprepared for how much the film engaged me emotionally. Nothing I've seen in the last decade has moved me more.

I think Carax said something along the lines of (sorry if this is a misremembering) irony is not translatable into cinema but is to theatre, which I don't agree with in the slightest but I'll cosign the reading that this film works much better without being drenched in it

I didn't find the screenplay emotionally direct at all until the last sequence. Most of the film felt at a distance to me, possibly (although I don't think this is entirely it) baked in because of the half-opera form.

pistolwink wrote: Tue Aug 24, 2021 9:57 pm I'd be really curious what younger people with no knowledge of Carax's films -- as in, most of Adam Driver's obsessive fans -- think of it.

I actually watched this the other night with a group of friends (all in their mid to late twenties) who had absolutely no familiarity with any of Carax's other work and they all either liked or loved Annette. I can't speak for them, but for me I was taken by the film's panoply of stylistic flourishes which evoked everything from Jacques Demy to Jim Henson. I would definitely need to see it again to pick up on all of the little allusions Carax fits into what is (at least on the surface) a fairly simple story of love and loss. But to add something to the debate over the film's emotional impact/distance, I think the ending was extremely resonant, in part because it provides a mirror of the opening number (which is indeed one of the most joyful of the year). That opening direct address almost begs us to take part as spectators, whereas Driver's final lines of the film seem to chastise us for watching what is the disintegration of a monstrous man and the potential love he squandered. But I think it would be a mistake to assume that Carax is chastising the audience for "watching" his tragic romance up to the bitter end. If anything, it feels like a solemn acknowledgment of the ethical limits of what we're permitted to see unfold in a lurid tabloid tale that's also about how popular tropes in these sort of operatic tragedies persist within our cultural imagination.

In his own iconoclastic manner, Carax is channeling some of the energy Cocteau conjured for his Beauty and the Beast, urging us to buy into the dictates of the fabulist construct he and his talented artistic collaborators have created (when Carax asked the viewer to hold their breath, the people I was watching the film with gladly acquiesced, and I think that helped in some small way to ease them into the artifice of the film). Where Cocteau subverted the "happy ending" of the fable he adapted, Carax (and Sparks, whose score is a lot better than some of the reviews I've read are giving it credit) exchanges the grandiose final note of a tragic opera for a whispered plea from a recognizably human monster. The question of whether, or even how, we're supposed to empathize with the perpetrator of great emotional and physical violence is one that's come up again and again since the #MeToo Movement first began, particularly in conversations where we attempt to distinguish the art from the artist. I don't think Carax is providing us any easy answers for these questions (though he certainly doesn't pretend Henry is a great artist, even making him the butt of a joke during the "You Used To Laugh" number as he tries proving how little he cares about his audience's opinion by screaming at them about how little their opinion matters to him).

But what the film does do, and which I think is what makes it so poignant, is vividly illustrate how any relationship, either interpersonal or one between a raconteur and their rapt listener, is crucial to sustaining our sense of existential, never mind artistic, sense of importance. When we're truly alone with our unresolved emotional tumult to the point of self-loathing that we're unable to make sense of our inchoate longing for something or someone without another person to articulate that feeling to, that's a profoundly tragic fate (I keep thinking about the character of Simon Helberg's Accompanist, who has two small sneakily devastating moments in the film's second half). And when we abuse the attention of another person and confuse that attention for either affection or revulsion, the consequences are easy to forecast for all except the person committing such toxic behavior. Bilge Ebiri's excellent write-up of the ending taps into an auditory trick I also picked up on in the ending related to the ways "love" and "loathe" are made phonetically similar. Because he's incapable of telling the difference between the two, Henry's condemned himself to a horrible fate that's sorrowful less for his sake than for the sake of the love we catch in fleeting glimpses, love which he fails to nurture because it remains as alien to him as his marionette daughter is to us

Spoiler

or at least until she becomes real all too late.

That was a long-winded stab at attempting to voice some of my own thoughts on this movie, but all this is to say that I'm firmly in the camp that liked it (a lot, actually) and that I can't wait to watch it again.

Great writeup, MitchPerrywinkle, I enjoyed reading that