There is little sense to be found in the dream wrapped in a fantasy inside an illusion that is Leos Carax’s Holy Motors.
France
3*
Director:
Leos Carax
Screenwriter:
Leos Carax
Directors of Photography:
Caroline Champetier
Yves Cape
Running time: 115 minutes
Though always entertaining, Holy Motors is almost impossible to decode at the first viewing, if at all. This is Mulholland Drive territory, and, even if you find yourself laughing at the madness or having your jaw drop at the sight of some utterly bizarre moments, in the end, the ludicrousness of the situations makes it difficult to truly absorb what you have just been exposed to.
The first scene should already give you a very good idea of where — well, in the vaguest of senses — this film is headed. A man, played by director Leos Carax himself, lies on a bed in a gaudy hotel room, a Jack Russell at his feet. He gets up, walks slowly towards the window, where an airplane is landing on the runway on the other side of the road. He walks on, to the wall, where he lifts his arm and sticks his middle finger, made from metal, into a hole, turns it and unlocks the wall. Nothing happens, so he punches through and breaks down a concealed door.
He continues down a passage to arrive at a cinema, where he and we see the backs of the viewers’ heads. He looks down, to where a big black dog is walking slowly down the middle, which now resembles a church aisle, before a fade-out. None of these characters, either human or animal, reappears, but it is difficult not to be intrigued. It is this intrigue that Carax will rely on throughout his two-hour film, though the latter has no payoff and only hints at possible interpretations, none of them ever probed.
Things seem to occur for no real reason other than to provoke extreme bafflement in the viewer, as the film’s main character — not the guy in the opening scene, however, because he disappears entirely from the film — embarks on a daylong journey of adventures, role-playing his way through the most random assortment of situations without any clear aim other than getting the job done.
The main character, simply known as Monsieur Oscar (Denis Lavant), is picked up one morning at his fancy Art Deco residence by a white stretch limousine driven by the wonderful Céline (Édith Scob), whose voice is firm yet tinged with notes of vulnerability, and we wonder whether her relationship with Oscar is professional or personal. Céline informs him he has nine “meetings” for the day and proceeds to deliver him to the first, for which he dresses up as a decrepit old Gypsy woman with a crutch begging for money on the streets of Paris. He doesn’t meet anyone and always stays in character, even speaking Romani to himself. He is followed and perhaps minded over — here, but never again — by heavies in black suits.
Eight other meetings follow, which become progressively more violent without ever losing their capacity to shock, either by having Oscar (made up as Monsieur Merde from Carax’s contribution to the anthology film Tokyo!) bite the finger off a PR girl at a fashion shoot in the Père Lachaise cemetery before kidnapping the all-too-willing fashion model and curling up to her in his birthday suit, in a way that unmistakably calls to mind Jesus Christ, specifically Michelangelo’s Pietà, and the model taking the role of one of the two Marys, in a sewer that runs below the centuries-old tombs.
Between each meeting, Oscar returns to the limousine, where he reads through a folder prepared for him, perhaps by Céline, perhaps by someone higher up, and transforms himself during the short period of time that the car takes to navigate the streets of the city. This transformation, both physical and behavioural, inevitably raises the notion of performance, and thereby of actors playing roles. Oscar’s second meeting is at a film studio, where he writhes around on a floor with another woman in a dark room, dry humping each other as their motions are captured by sensors and used to create the images of dragons engaging in carnal knowledge.
Later in the film, in one of the only moments that seem to tell us something about this man whose real identity is a complete mystery, he says he does the work “pour la beauté du geste” (for the beauty of the act). There is no doubt this man is deeply devoted to his craft, but what the craft is exactly, what purpose it serves and who is financing all these trans-Parisian rides in a stretch limousine remain enigmatic to the bitter end, before things end on a note that is beyond weird.
That is not to say the film isn’t entertaining, but one keeps hoping for a scene or an exchange that would bring some clarity to this surreal dream of which we can only be certain there will be nine meetings. Well, maybe it’s 10, but that’s another story…
During the fashion shoot in the cemetery, the photographer, dressed up only in PT shorts, repeatedly mutters “beauty” at the sight of the model and “weird” at the sight of Oscar/Merde. Those two words sum up the film as well as anything else.
This is a slightly modified version of the writer’s review that first appeared in The Prague Post.