Holy Motors: ****/*****, or 8/10
For
those of you who were wondering whatever happened to Leos Carax after
his last film Pola X (1999) sadly flopped, wonder no more, for
Carax has returned from obscurity with a vengeance. Of course, you
must have heard of him before having been able to miss him, and
considering the general inaccessibility of his often experimental
work in cinema, his mere existence will have gone unnoticed to many.
His latest project, the hallucinatory Holy Motors, deserves to
change such neglect, considering it's nothing short of a mesmerizing
night drive through Paris. By limousine, no less.
The
protagonist, if there is one specific protagonist to speak of, is a
man referred to only as Mr. Oscar (excellent performance on multiple
levels by Carax regular Denis Lavant). When night falls, this
shadowy, enigmatic character is picked up by his personal limo driver
Céline (Edith Scob), who takes him from one strange job to another,
with little or no apparent connection between them. Successively, we
see Mr. Oscar as Motion-Capture performer, madman, assassin, musician and
deathbed mourner, among other things. For each outing, Mr. Oscar is
supplied with the necessary make-up, costumes and accessories to
finish his task, without the audience knowing who orders him around
and why exactly he does what he does.
In his
“exile” from the film industry, Carax on several occasions
started to develop new projects and wrote material accordingly, but
it always failed to materialize in a finished film, his ideas being
turned down every time. Though his persistence at least produced a
number of short features, the final product that is Holy Motors
clearly reveals the diversity of ideas that haunted the director for
over a decade, resulting in a kaleidoscopic two-hour piece that is
open to as many interpretations as it offers story threads. This
leaves the spectator ever unable to fully account for them all when
suggesting a consistent story line that explains the lot of them, but
such a loss to come up with a final solution for this film's
narrative whole – something which clearly was never intended to be
found – only makes the film a greater joy to behold. That is, for
those members in the audience who want to be surprised and can
swallow a lack of coherent diegesis. It must be said, this film
surely is not for everybody: when viewing this picture, as many
people left the room as remained in their seats, the latter no doubt
utterly captivated by Carax's bizarre joy ride through their
minds,while the former undoubtedly found themselves repulsed by this
attack on their sanity, or proved just generally unable to cope with
what they experienced. For those that stayed, it also helped to be
treated to many a superb image of Paris by night, the director
utilizing light and shadow to maximum effect to achieve a sense of
constant ill-at-ease paired with total fascination, both
'Verfremdung' during and unquestionable acceptance of the full 115
minute trip we take as we escort Mr. Oscar from one sketch to the
next.
What do
I think is going on here plot wise? I must firmly state that I
believe Holy Motors does never intend to deliver us a
full-fledged narrative which allows itself to be entirely rationally
explicable. That said, I believe the film revolves around the act of
seeing and being seen as an actor, the question remaining who but
ourselves is watching Mr. Oscar, assuming he's actually supposed to
perform for anybody's pleasure at all. As Mr. Oscar, Lavant is being
maneuvered from one play to another, having to rely on all his skills
as an actor while often enduring excessive make-up and clothing,
without ever being watched by an audience explicitly. Mr. Oscar is
clearly acting, but he's not being filmed, as if he's simply running
around practicing, trying to 'stay in shape' as any athlete would
without there being an actual contest involved. At the same time,
Carax seems to expose the lies of being an actor, as Mr. Oscar is
moved from one project to another without time in-between to be
himself, taking on so many roles but never living a life of his own.
His roles are as variable as are his multiple personae, and
considering he should have died twice in his line of duty, as he is
both violently shot and stabbed, it's certain this can't be anything
but acting. Certain actions Mr. Oscar plays out serve no true purpose
for anybody: in the role of the horrifying madman, Oscar eats
flowers, bites off fingers and subsequently abducts and sexually
assaults a beautiful model (Eva Mendes' most oddball role ever), but
such actions are devoid of reason other than playing the madman. The
only spectators enjoying them, or being completely freaked out by
them, are we, Carax's viewers.
Anything
conclusive about Carax's supposedly serious comments on the busy life
of a professional actor we might think we can distillate from this
film is inexorably shot down in the closing scene when Oscar's limo,
along with many others limousines from other people sharing his
incoherent occupation, is collected back by the Holy Motors company
and stored in their huge warehouse until further notice: using their
lights, the cars communicate about their day and the various roles
their occupants played, some of them at the same time urging their
peers to be quiet because they want to sleep. Whatever philosophical
or metaphysical message you thought you could discern in Holy
Motors, this ending makes it perfectly obvious there's no point
to take this film overly serious. As this final scene clearly
illustrates, the last laugh is for Leos Carax, who with this
grotesque but terrific film proves there's still room left for
inexplicable, near-experimental cinema.
Directed
by Leos Carax
Starring:
Denis Lavant, Edith Scob, Eva Mendes
France/Germany:
Pierre Grise Productions, 2012
And
watch the trailer here:
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