New York Film Festival 2012

[Chris Knipp]

LEOS CARAX: HOLY MOTORS (2012)


DENIS LAVANT IN HOLY MOTORS

Merde, etc.

Holy Motors is a phantasmagoric, eccentric and wonderful trip film that depicts the course of a single long day in the life of Monsieur Oscar (Denis Lavant), who travels around Paris by white stretch limo for a series of "appointments." He is a kind of actor who transforms into different characters each time, eleven in all. The interior of the limo is a dressing room, as elaborately equipped as young financier Eric Packer's nearly identical white limo in Cronenberg's (also one-day-spanning) Cosmopolis, (also shown first in competition at Cannes) and this film too ends with the limo drawing into a vast garage. Oscar is picked up from a mansion in the country by Céline (Édith Scob), his faithful chauffeur of the sad, elegant face, who calls his attention to the folders on his seat for each successive assignment. He begins the day disguised (only while in the back of the limo) as a wealthy banker ("Le banquier") -- perhaps who he "is"? His first "appointment" is as an aged crone ("La mendiante") who begs for change on a Paris bridge. We see him begin to put on his disguises, wigs, makeup, clothes. The next assignment (L'OS de Motion-Capture") is at a digital production studio where he dons motion laser-readable tights and does acrobatics.

This is followed by the most eccentric impersonation, an extraordinary troglodyte who or which steals a fashion model from Père Lachaise cemetery and takes her to his cave in the Paris sewers. This grows out of a 2008 short film Lavant and Carax did for the collection Tokyo!, is arguably the weirdest bit and was the starting point of the whole amazing film.

It's not clear (to me, anyway) whether the next "appointment" (le Père") even is one, or just life, it's so everyday-seeming and natural: Oscar gets himself up to look like an average dad and picks up his daughter from a party and drops her off at home. The next job, another rapid virtuoso display of changes ("Le tueur"), is a double assassination, and the one after that is a shooting on the sidewalk. Following this Carax goes into melodrama gear for a death scene influenced by Henry James' Portrait of a Lady. He's run through a panoply of genres by now, noir, actioner, meller, family drama, surreal fantasy, and there's musical romance and more to come -- a beautiful, touching sequence in the empty Samaritaine department store, with Australian singer Kylie Minogue, and a tragic ending.

I will not tell you about Oscar's last trip, to his "home" and "family" (" L'homme au foyer") except to say there has been a species change. I omitted one vibrant short sequence, after "Le Père," the Entr'acte/Interval/Intermission in which Oscar marches and sings and plays the accorion in a band ("L'accordéoniste "). But to fullly describe this film with all its allusions, its jokes, its surprises, its secrets, would take a volume.

And what are we to make of all this? The amusements of an insanely idle rich man? Multiple personality disorder, caused by some trauma? "The next evolution in entertainment," (as indicated in a conversation with a shadowy boss figure played by Michel Piccoli)? Or "a bizarre fantasy of movie-making" as suggested by the intro featuring a sleepy Carax himself crawling from bed into a crowded cinema, as Rob Nelson of Variety points out? Or -- why not simply "pure pleasure," as the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw decides? Anyway Holy Motors is extraordinary, a cinephile's delight (and a conventional movie-goer's annoyance or nightmare), and whether endlessly fascinating or just quite nutty, certainly a hilarious and audacious, authentically and deeply surreal, highly allusive and highly cinematic genre-busting original of a film. It's never quite defined what Monsieur Oscar's "work" means, but he seems to be blending acting with life, in a wildly more beautiful version of what goes on in Giorgos Lanthimos' relatively humorless and flat 2011 film Alps (SFIFF '12).

From Cannes, the AV Club correspondent Mike D'Angelo tweeted a, for him, astronomical score for Holy Motors of 88. His runners-up were Haneke's Amour (77) and Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom (75), followed by, further down the scale, Ursula Meier (Sister), Matteo Garrone (Reality) and Jacques Audiard (Rust and Bone). Next to Carax's 88 in D'Angelo's Tweet review was just a two-word comment, "Holy shit," which can be read as an expression of balls-out awe or a sly reference to the film's origins in the Tokyo! "Merde" episode, maybe both. Seeeing all those powerful films at Cannes in close proximity, D'Angelo rated Carax highest. It's a cinematic mindblower. D'Angelo correctly predicted that it wouldn't win a top prize (Haneke and Garrone got those), he thought because the jury just wasn't daring enough, but he was disregarding that some viewers really hate this film. He predicted it would be the film Cannes 2012 will be remembered for. It did win a prize at Cannes, the Prix de Jeunesse (awarded by a jury of 18 to 25-year-olds).

In the Q&A at the New York Film Festival press screening, Carax said his theme was the question "whether we still want to experience stuff, do action." He has also commented that stretch limos strike him as interesting anachronisms, out of date, depicting "the end of an era, the era of large, visible machines." Other themes are cinema, acting, life, transformation, the protean nature of existence -- and a homage to the protean abilities of Denis Lavant, whom Carax says he does not know, is not friends with, and has barely ever talked to in real life, but who is obviously a remarkable collaborator and essential to this film. These cryptic, intentionally unrevealing details actually reveal something: an intuitive and original filmmaker who has some deep thoughts about what acting and cinema do, though the film can be read as nothing but a series of eccentric riffs -- till you start thinking about it. Whether this is a masterpiece or a curio is worth mulling over. But it strikes me as I'd expected: as a standout title in the Main Slate of the 2012 New York Film Festival.

Holy Motors, 116 min., debuted at Cannes, opened in France July 4, where it received a galaxy of critical raves (Allociné 4.3) but a lukewarm Allociné spectator response (2.9) indicative that this adventurous watch is a hard box office sell. Screened for this review as part of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center. It opens in New York Oct. 17; US national release Nov. 9.