Get your motor running, weirdly
Holy Motors is a bravura trip, if you have the patience for it
The new Leos Carax film, Holy Motors, is a magnificently unhinged work, a surreal examination of love (perhaps) and movies (maybe) and Leos Carax (apparently). It doesn’t exactly make sense, at least not in the way one means the word, but it makes something greater than sense. It makes nonsense.
It is, in short, a wonderment: a folly, an artistic coup de grace, a movie that should have won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, if only for its combination of self-indulgent auteurism and almost complete lack of commercial appeal. It is a trip into the kind of bravura insanity that movies can hardly afford anymore. Holy Motors makes Cloud Atlas look like something by Ron Howard.
It begins with a man (Carax himself) awakening to the haunting sound of seagulls and a boat horn, and wandering through a door hidden behind the wallpaper of his bedroom. It leads to the balcony of a movie theatre where a crowd is watching a silent film of a naked man scurrying about a room. A dream? A metaphor? The inside of Carax’s mind? Hold back the edges of your skirts, ladies. We’re about to plunge kneedeep into symbolism.
Holy Motors concerns Mr. Oscar — a name this film can hardly aspire to — a rich man who heads off to work in Paris in a long white limousine driven by his chauffeur Céline (Edith Scob). Like the car in David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis, the vehicle becomes a world of its own, insulated from “reality” but hardly part of anything more sensible. It’s a mobile dressing room, complete with makeup mirror, rubber noses, wigs and other disguises a man might need to become another man. Or woman. Or goblin.
Mr. Oscar is played by Denis Lavant, a lithe sort of goblin himself (he played the circus performer in Carax’s 1991 film The Lovers on the Bridge). Blessed with an elfin face of surpassing unbeauty, Lavant is something of a chameleon, which suits the character perfectly. Throughout the movie, Mr. Oscar puts on various disguises to emerge, for instance, in a motion-capture bodysuit to do martial arts moves in a green-screen film studio and engage in a pas de deux with an undulating female acrobat in a tight red unitard. She twists herself into impossible positions of sexual abandon while Mr. Oscar simulates various acts that give a whole new meaning to the term “digital effects.”
Mr. Oscar changes from one character to another as he keeps various “appointments” that are written in a binder in his back seat. They don’t relate to one another except insofar as they sometimes have the feeling of movie roles. In one of his guises, Lavant puts on a beard, long curved fingernails and a green goblin outfit and transforms into a mischievous gnome, the very character — art-house patrons will remember — known as Monsieur Merde, whom Lavant created for Carax’s section of the 2008 triptych Tokyo! Monsieur Merde crashes a fashion shoot (“He’s so weird,” enthuses the photographer) and kidnaps the model (Eva Mendes), whom he carries into the sewer where he licks her armpit and redesigns her outfit. He is naked and sexually aroused for a significant part of this encounter.
Star-hunters will also be intrigued by a section in which Mr. Oscar meets a former lover (singer Kylie Minogue) in an abandoned department store that retains some nostalgic allure (“I came here to buy you some bras”). She also appears to be travelling in disguise, another performer trying on faces and personas and now about to live her last night.
It would be a shame — and could inspire professional medical intervention — to give away too many of the surprises of Holy Motors. Shortly after the entr’acte, however, when the accordion band stops, there is a significant encounter with a shadowy man (veteran French actor Michel Piccoli) to whom Mr. Oscar talks about his recent dissatisfactions.
He says the beauty of his art is suffering due to the lack of beholders. This may be the nub of Holy Motors, although to be fair, this is a movie that has gone beyond such notions as a nub.
Rather, it is a statement about creativity, as irrefutable as a poem: unique and glorious — cinematographer Caroline Champetier has captured a glittering Paris — and totally zonked out. You’ll want to see it twice, or, possibly, not at all.