the marvelous strangeness of Leos Carax’s “mariannette”

FRANCE 3 – WEDNESDAY 1^ER SEPTEMBER AT 11:30 PM – DOCUMENTARY

They have in their eyes the same wonder tinged with worry as a mother and father watching their baby take its first steps. Except that the child here is made of wood, fabric and papier-mâché. Estelle Charlier and Romuald Collinet are somewhat special parents, they are puppeteers. They give life to characters that they shape and bring to life, like little Annette from the film of the same name by Leos Carax, which opened the Cannes Film Festival this year (where he won the scene), and where the child-doll “plays” alongside Marion Cotillard (Ann) and Adam Driver (Henry).

Filmmaker Sandrine Veysset (Will there be snow at Christmas, 1996; Martha … Martha, 2001) followed, upstream of the film, all the stages in the making of the puppet, the manipulation tests to translate as accurately as possible the requests of the screenplay and Leos Carax, the rehearsals with the actors. His documentary, nicely titled Baby Annette, to the impossible they are required, opens the doors to the studio of the two artists of the Isère company The Hanged. A magical world where we discover how, in a very traditional way, they manage to give their creations the illusion of life.

Secrets of ingenuity

You don’t have to have seen Leos Carax’s feature film (still in theaters) to be seduced by Sandrine Veysset’s film. Certainly, those who were moved by the sequences where little Annette clings to her father’s shoulders or lets herself be rocked by her mother will discover the secrets of ingenuity that these scenes demanded from the puppeteers. But, beyond this look behind the scenes, the director invites us to a captivating dive into their world.

As an introduction to the film, the voice of Leos Carax explains his choice to offer the title role to a “non-human”: “Annette couldn’t be a real little girl, couldn’t be synthesis, couldn’t be a robot. So what could she be? An animated object that I could see and film in the middle of the actors and that they could touch, embrace. A glance. A puppet. Or a “mariannette”, as she was called. ”

This daring bet has been taken up thanks to the talent of Estelle Charlier and Romuald Collinet, who we see, for months, applying to conceive their “child”, choosing his skin color so that it matches. that of the actors, sculpting his gaze and his expressions, declined on various masks – about fifteen – which will come to rest on his face to translate his emotions. The photo of a Ukrainian girl, spotted by Carax, her forehead high, her eyes slightly outlined, served as a model. They had the idea of ​​adding large ears to him, which protrude from his red hair, in order to mark his strangeness. And to contribute to its poetry. His movements were the subject of many tests before the little character joined the film set where accompanied by a real portable workshop gathering all the instruments necessary for his mobility.

If Sandrine Veysset’s documentary lifts the veil on the important device implemented to allow Annette to exist, it in no way alters the emotion that her presence arouses and which gives Leos Carax’s film its marvelous strangeness.