Holy Motors

2012
Director/Writer: Leos Carax

Compared to previous years, 2012 personally hasn’t been a standout year for new films for me. There have been some entertaining rides along the way: Moonrise Kingdom was a charming love letter to young romance, The Dark Knight Rises was a sprawling, busy, flawed but ultimately epic film about the breakdown of socio-ethical values and the superhero myth while Skyfall simply re-affirmed my love of James Bond films. But there wasn’t much that that truly inspired or enthralled me to any great extent. There was Amour, Michael Haneke’s soul-crushing study of an elderly man’s devotion to his wife whose mind is slowly dying but for me the real standout this year was Holy Motors.

Despite not winning any prizes at the Cannes Film Festival this year, Holy Motors was the film which seemed to generate the greatest amount of buzz and fervour out of anything playing on all of the websites, blogs and reviews I was finding. I didn’t know anything about the director Leos Carax (this is his first film for 13 years) or any of the major actors in it. All I knew were some bizarre details about the plot which didn’t seem to make much sense and some glowing reviews praising its originality; it was intriguing. The trailer didn’t offer much more- just a series of distinct and memorable clips and images but it was enough for me. I couldn’t wait to see it.

So what is it about then? We follow a day in the life of the mysterious figure Monsieur Oscar (Denis Lavant), during his bizarre odyssey across Paris in the back of a white stretched limo driven by his dutiful chauffer Céline (Édith Scob). His day involves him engaging in a series of ‘appointments’, for each of which he has to perform a new character in public complete with new costumes, make-up and personality. He starts the day as a middle aged banker leaving his art deco home replete with luxury cars and armed security. Throughout the film he plays an elderly crippled woman begging for change, an ordinary man picking up his daughter from a party, an assassin assigned to kill his doppelganger and an actor performing stunts for motion capture animation on a soundstage, amongst several other roles. The reason why he does this is never made entirely clear and the only thing linking them is Monsieur Oscar himself.

To put it bluntly, this film is insane. A very funny series of surrealist stories, Holy Motors is not constructed like or driven by any narrative conventions but instead takes the fundamentals of cinematic form and genre and subverts them, inviting the audience into this strange dreamscape not through narrative engagement but through bold imagery, warped humour and a strong awareness of itself. It’s a massively self-conscious film, filled with loving homages to previous French cinema and playfully running wild with ideas that don’t make much sense together and encourage the viewer to be aware that they are watching a film. Some might get frustrated by its clear lack of structure or purpose but for me the real joy of this film was never being able to guess what was about to happen next. Surrealism is so hard to do but this makes it look easy, making something that can at once be crudely funny, deliciously disturbing or knowingly tedious and existential.

Filled with unique and unforgettable setpieces, Holy Motors is frenetic, vivid and schizophrenic. It is a film about cinema- beginning with a prologue in which the director Carax himself wakes from a dream in a hotel room and breaks through a wall with a giant key embedded in his hand, he emerges at the back of a packed cinema filled with a sleeping crowd. He’s transfixed by this new world, one formed by the artistic visions of the subconscious where anything is possible. Throughout the film, it asserts itself as a cinematic vision. Everyone in it is aware that they are performing for someone watching- indeed it is their professions. Each character M. Oscar plays is within its own cinematic realm- one time it is a violent thriller, another a languid melodrama about death filled with highly emotional performances and overblown cliché dialogue; it even turns into a musical as bizarrely Kylie Minogue turns up and sings a song about loss, heartbreak and change. Clips from early cinema of dancers and male bodies on display are spliced throughout. There’s even an intermission. The best bit is M. Oscar’s third appointment, a masterful sequence; he plays a revolting sewer dweller that emerges in the Père Lachaise cemetery to the theme from Godzilla, where he discovers a photoshoot by a deranged photographer and an American model whom he kidnaps and takes to his underground lair. So ludicrously funny, it’s also a scathing satire of contemporary France (sewers filled with illegal immigrants, a woman being disguised in a burka) and of self-obsessed celebrity culture.

Holy Motors is not like anything else I’ve ever seen recently. It’s refreshing to see something which doesn’t try to force overwrought thematic subtext down your throat. Instead you’re invited to simply enjoy the ride and marvel in the spectacle of a film that doesn’t take itself at all seriously. Certainly some viewers might dislike its unconventionality and puzzling content which is full of questions and secrets, but it’s just so much fun that these don’t matter. They’re not what this is about anyway; this is a hallucinogenic experiment of the capabilities of cinema, so wonderfully formed and put together.

*Spoilers* But seriously, what is it about? It can definitely be seen as treatise on the art of acting and the nature of performance. In his TARDIS-like limo seemingly bigger on the inside and filled with boxes of props, costumes and make-up, we see the upmost care M. Oscar puts into each of his performances, the vast amount of time he spends carefully preparing for each role. The true centrepiece of the film is Lavant’s extraordinary performance, he truly throws himself fully into each character and it’s delightful to watch.

Holy Motors could also be about the performances we ourselves put on everyday- how we mark ourselves in the world through our behaviour, appearance and manner and how this is distinguished from our true selves seen only in private. We catch only brief glimpses of the real Oscar, when he is alone in the limo with Céline- he’s gradually downtrodden and tired as the day continues. One wonders if he’s grown increasingly weary of having to play so many such exacting roles while his real self grows older and is increasingly exerted. We catch a brief snippet of his strain as he takes a sneaky cigarette before entering the house of his final performance of the day, sighing, knowing he has to do it all over again tomorrow. The only glimpses of the real world he ever gets during the day is by watching the Parisian streets glide past on a television monitor in his limo. He spends his day interacting with families and strangers but everything that occurs, all the emotions he feels, are false; he’s definitely a lonely man consumed by a wider societal need to perform, to entertain and to distract. This is applicable to everyone in the film- Céline at the end of the day puts on a mask, this perhaps being the performance she puts on in her personal life (as well as being a reference to the wonderful French horror film Eyes Without a Face (1960) which Edith Scob also starred in). Eva Mendes’s kidnapped model retains her emotionless public persona required for her work, even during the chaos happening around her in the sewers away from the photoshoot.

One theory I want to propose is how Oscar could be developing melancholia over his growing old and his lack of genuine human relationships. Each of his roles could in some way reflect his own phobias and insecurities. He has no genuine family, yet the film is filled with daughters or daughter-figures (the little girl saying goodbye at the start, the self-hating daughter leaving the party, the devoted niece by her dying uncle’s bedside, the chimpanzees), perhaps stating his own desire for a child or something to give him purpose. The sewer monster’s final descent into almost childlike dependency yet one tinged with a creepy sexual undercurrent belays his desperate need for interaction. The assassin’s murder of himself (which is then repeated vice versa) could be a sense of self-loathing. The crippled woman, alone and begging, or at the other end of the scale, the banker attacked in the street, could be his future- isolated and misunderstood by the rest of the world that demands homogeneity.

It seems the world is changing around Oscar- he describes how he started this work and his love of it for “the beauty of the act”, yet he laments the loss of the beholder to appreciate this beauty. This could be a protest at the state of modern technology in the world- he decries how he unable to see the cameras anymore, perhaps because they are too small, and therefore he can no longer be aware of the audience watching him. Further, we can see the acts he performs on the soundstage with the contortionist for the motion capture- here the camera lingers on the fluidity and form of their bodies and ultimately juxtaposes this with the final product their movements are helping to create: a crude animation about copulating dragon monsters. It’s not worthy of their efforts and it masks the real artists at work- the dedicated actors. Finally there is the wickedly silly scene at the very end of the film, where fears of being replaced and made inadequate by new machines are discussed by the limos, complaints about how people no longer want to see anything beyond what they use and want.

One major question is who is Oscar really performing for? It seems he’s in the business of creating filmic fiction for someone- it’s implied he’s be doing this for some time and we meet several other actors also engaged in acting for unseen audiences. Are the crowds unseen, and if so how are they watching? Oscar says he cannot see the cameras anymore, so does that mean they are actually there? Is anyone actually watching, or is this business (that of cinema itself and the art of performance) slowly dying, to be replaced cheap imitations and lazy commercialism? Or is the camera simply Carax’s, and the audience we ourselves watching right now? Few films have taken such measures as to make the viewer alert to the fact that we are watching something artificial and staged, created for artistic and entertainment purposes. Do we simply take for granted the efforts that go into creating cinematic art, and are we ignoring the truly deserving artworks in favour of those that pride novelty, technological gimmickry and convention over creative innovation? Oscar’s performance in the mo-cap studio is restricted and dictated by a demanding unseen voice, telling him exactly what to do; this then compared to his gloriously unhinged performance as the sewer monster.

Frankly, I could be way off the mark with all of these interpretations- Holy Motors is so dense in content which is so hypnagogic that it is open to any number of readings. People could easily hate this film, simply sit back and enjoy what’s happening or try hard to engage with its deranged content, but either way they can never say that they’ve ever seen anything like this before. Its refusal to follow the rules or frankly even simply make perfect sense is inspiring to watch and consider and that’s why for me Holy Motors is the best film of 2012.

Originally posted on my previous blog on 29th December 2012.