Holy Motors (2012)
Directed by Leos Carax

Film Review

Who'd have thought that the most highly rated French film of 2011 would turn out to be an old-fashioned black and white silent film made in Hollywood?   An even more unlikely prospect is in sight for 2012. Judging by the critical reaction it has garnered so far, the most acclaimed French film of 2012 looks like being a surreal low budget oddity featuring Kylie Minogue, chimpanzees and a man who thinks he is Lon Chaney.  Holy Motors marks the long-awaited return of director Leos Carax, who appears to have been in deep hibernation since the critical and commercial failure of his last full-length film Pola X (1999).  Feted as one of the most promising young filmmakers of his generation after his first two attention-grabbing films, Boy Meets Girl (1984) and Mauvais sang (1986), Carax's career fell into a swift decline when his most ambitious film, Les Amants du Pont-Neuf (1991), failed to recoup more than fraction of its massive production cost.  Now Carax is back, reborn, revitalised and raring to unleash his unique creative vision on an unwary cinema audience.  French cinema will never be the same again, if his zany comeback feature is anything to go by.  The Second Coming is upon us, so be ready.

If Holy Motors does emerge as the top French film of the year, it has certainly earned it.  It is a complete one-off, a brilliant surreal oddity that simultaneously celebrates the entire cinematic tradition (in all its rich diversity) whilst plunging with careless insouciance into some of the most profound metaphysical conundra known to man.  As the film flits from genre to genre like a manic channel-hopper it takes us on the most frenetic cinematic mystery tour ever, challenging and entertaining its audience in roughly equal measure.  In this film, Carax achieves in just under two hours pretty much what Jean-Luc Godard spent four and half soul-destroying hours trying (and failing) to do with his mammoth Histoire(s) du cinéma, and does it without driving his entire audience to suicide.  Holy Motors is a film that is as profound or as daft as you want it to be - a supremely intelligent homage to the art of cinema or a criminally enjoyable piece of escapist nonsense.  Either way, it will leave you with a (bewildered) smile on your face and a deep yearning for more of the same.

As to what the film really means, that is anyone's guess.  Even Carax himself doesn't seem to be able to answer that one.  "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder", says a sinister-looking man with a conspicuous port-wine stain (Michel Piccoli), prompting the question: what happens to beauty when there is no one to see it?  This is surely the biggest clue as to what the film is about: the relationship between art and life.  The prologue would seem to endorse this interpretation.  Here, a man stirs from his bed and wanders in a somnambulistic state through a secret passageway into a cinema hall filled with people watching a film.  It is surely no coincidence that the sleepwalker is played by Carax himself (credited, significantly, as The Dreamer).  Apart from making a humorous allusion to his long absence from our screens, Carax is reminding us that there is no separation between life and art - these are merely two manifestations of the same underlying truth, a universal creative imperative from which all vitality springs.

Cinema is the most dreamlike of all the arts but it is also the art form that feels closest to reality.  By throwing out the conventions of cinema with manic glee and muddying the waters between fantasy and reality, Holy Motors boldly asserts what we know to be true but dare not admit: that there is no barrier between art and life, and neither is there one between life and death.   Delete one of the 'O's in the film's title (as Carax does in the film's final scene) and we get an anagram of Holy Morts - a reminder that the dead are merely shadows of the living, just as art is a shadow of life (or vice versa).  This is the kind of migraine-inducing metaphysical contortion that Holy Motors forces you into if you take it too seriously.  (Maybe it's best to take a few stiff drinks beforehand and just sit back and laugh at all the funny bits.)

It is infinitely easier to describe what the film consists of than to say what it is meant to be about.  Holy Motors is constructed as a series of unrelated vignettes in which the central character, Monsieur Oscar, assumes a variety of roles, changing his appearance to fit the situation like an actor assuming various guises in a series of short plays.  When we first meet Oscar, he appears to be a respectable businessman, being driven around Paris in his smart stretch limousine by an enigmatic female chauffeur.  But Oscar's appointments are far from what we might expect and before he leaves the car he gets out his makeup box and, before our eyes, he becomes a completely different person.  Oscar is clearly a kindred spirit of Fantômas and Lon Chaney, a man of a thousand faces and a fetish for latex.  First he is a bedraggled female tramp, then he is an attentive family man; later he is a hired assassin and a dying old man.  At one point, he puts on a tight-fitting catsuit and performs an erotic dance with a female partner in a high tech motion capture studio.  In another sequence, he becomes Monsieur Merde (a character borrowed from Carax's contribution to the 2008 anthology film Tokyo!), a hideous sewer sprite who abducts an attractive young woman (Eva Mendes) and subjects her to his X-rated reinterpretation of Jean Cocteau's Belle et la bête.  Who is Monsieur Oscar?  Who is he working for?  Why does he go through this elaborate routine?  These are just three of the seventy million or so questions that pop into our heads as we watch the film and which Carax stubbornly refuses to answer.

It is telling that the main character is named Oscar, since Leos Carax is an anagram of Alex (the director's real first name) and Oscar (the award he presumably intends to win one day). It is equally fitting that Oscar should be played by Denis Lavant, an actor who has appeared in all but one of Carax's films and is (logically) his alter ego.  Lavant is a fine actor in his own right but he is particularly well-suited for Carax's unpredictable, off-kilter universe.  There are not many actors who could take on a dozen or so wildly contrasting roles in the same film and give them all separate, clearly defined identities (to the point that you could easily imagine they were played by different people).  As Lavant changes his appearance, so he completely changes the tone of the film, and it is with graceful ease that he steers us from one genre to another, from melodrama, to film noir thriller, to musical comedy and so forth, holding our attention like a master hypnotist or someone about to attack us with a very sharp meat cleaver.

What are we to make of Monsieur Oscar's performances?  One interpretation is that they represent a series of fantasies that the filmmaker conceives, parallel lives into which he projects himself and from which he derives inspiration for his films.  Another is that they represent the multiple facets of our own lives, lives that are made up of a series of mini-plays in which we adopt a different persona to match the occasion.  In film and literature, identity has become one of the most important themes of our era, but what Carax appears to be saying is that we have innumerable identities, or perhaps none at all.  We become what the situation demands, like a chameleon blending in with its surroundings.  If we have any identity at all, it is one that is infinitely variable, an identikit that allows us to become whoever or whatever we desire.  We are everyone and we are no one.

For the part of the mysterious chauffeur, Carax cast Edith Scob, partly to recompense her for having deleted all of her scenes from Les Amants du Pont-Neuf, but mainly so that he can include a cheeky reference to the actress's most famous role in Georges Franju's Les Yeux sans visage (1960), the greatest of all French horror films. Other cinema references abound and are too many to catch in a single viewing (or even ten viewings) of the film.  Suffice it to say that Luis Buñuel, Jean Cocteau, Jacques Demy and Jean-Luc Godard all get a generous look-in as Carax crafts the most gloriously self-indulgent homage to cinema money can buy.  Who better than Kylie Minogue to resurrect the spirit of Jean Seberg in an unashamedly kitsch nod to the big Hollywood musical?  Throw in the odd reference to Etienne-Jules Marey, Charlie Chaplin, Eugène Ionesco, Samuel Beckett, Henry James and King Kong and you have some idea what a bizarre and varied culture binge this is.

Leos Carax's original motivation for making Holy Motors was quite modest - essentially, it was just to alert the world to the fact that he was (a) still alive and (b) preparing to get back into the filmmaking saddle.  Even though he intended it to be a low budget production from the outset, Carax still had enormous difficult finding a financial backer.  The spectacular failure of Carax's last two features had made him as attractive an investment prospect as an Icelandic bank, but somehow he managed to raise 3.8 million euros - a derisory budget which forced him to drop his long-held aversion to digital photography.  The tight budget may have been a blessing in disguise, as it not only galvanised Carax's creativity, it also helped to restrain his famed penchant for cinematic grandiloquence.  When the film premiered at Cannes in May 2012 it met with a rapturous reception - it may not have won the Palme d'Or but it was honoured with the Prix de la Jeunesse (Youth Award), the same prize that Carax received in 1984 for his debut feature Boy Meets Girl (1984).  Since, Holy Motors has drawn critical acclaim across the world and achieves far more than its director could possibly have hoped for.  Leos Carax is back, and it looks as if he could be around for some time...

Film Synopsis

Monsieur Oscar is a man of many faces.  In the space of one day, he becomes a pathetic tramp, a ruthless killer, a grotesque sewer-dwelling monster, an erotic dancer, a family man, and more besides...  As he is chauffeured around Paris in his pristine white limousine by the mysterious Céline he busies himself, transforming his appearance with meticulous care.  For each situation he ends up in, he must have the perfect guise.  But who is he, and why does he go through this elaborate charade?  He might be an actor... but if he is, where are the cameras?