Holy Motors

Holy Motors (2012)

A bizarre (and highly praised) film that is ambitious and inventive to the point of pain. I wish it was as brilliant as it intends. As we follow the leading character Oscar through a series of seemingly unconnected events, it struck me that the goal is simply to stage these odd moments, almost choreographed surreal adventures where he takes on different personae (with elaborate costumes). The events don't achieve what you might call depth or meaning. They are interesting—how could they fail on that score?—yet interesting turns out to be not enough.

Still, look for high style throughout, some terrific underworld insanity, some unfiltered sex and violence, and lots and lots of pretense. I have a feeling there are some people who might rate this among their favorite films and so I'd say give this a try. It might take half an hour to know whether the changing roles and scenes (and the self-indulgence) will keep you sustained.

Since Oscar is shuttled from one location to another in a stretch limo, you get the feeling he might just be a filthy rich eccentric who refuses to be bored with life. He admits he started doing this (every day, we get the sense) for "the beauty of the act," and this high level of aesthetic tension seems insufficient for the depravity involved.

This is a French-German enterprise, set in Paris. It has enough quiet moments to make you impatient, but from the pause it will take off on another romp. The actor has to be admired, for sure—Denis Levant, known for his boundary pushing roles (from Shakespeare to experimental film). The director, Leos Carax is likewise associated with the avant garde —and with Levant. But they have tried to keep their grand experiment traditionally cinematic, as well, so there are lots of ways to appreciate what's going on. The filming is sublime, the ambiance from lighting to set design is gorgeous.

There is that dangerous point in a art when a work gets so serious it demands of itself a kind of perfect to succeed. And there are so many little holes here, even some odd moments in the acting, it becomes almost laughable. At times. Which is too bad. There is a lot here to take quite seriously, I think. Then again, maybe it's meant to be an absurdist dark comedy all the way. Which means we're allow to laugh after all. Go for it.

I suspect that viewers will either love or hate "Holy Motors," a surreal French drama that eventually falls victim to its own pretentiousness.

It tells the tale of an actor/quick-change artist who rides around Paris in a specially designed stretch-limo, donning various costumes and enacting bizarre movie-type scenes for paying customers. One moment he's a sewer-dwelling beast in search of a "beauty;" the next he's a hit man , then a female beggar, then a dying old man, even, at one point, a CGI effect come to life.

Written and directed by Leos Carax, the movie ultimately emerges as a cinematic Rorschach Test, open to whichever interpretation each member of the audience cares to get out of it. Is it about how we all eventually wind up donning masks and false identities as a means of escaping the crushing monotony of our daily lives? Or is it about how we use such masks to avoid showing ourselves and the world-at-large who we really are? Or is it a dissertation on the nature of art and the artist, or on the changing nature of movie making in an era in which the camera has become a ubiquitous part of everyday life, available to anyone and everyone at all times?

Who knows, and, frankly, who really cares? In terms of execution, Carax lacks the light hand and delicate touch of a Luis Bunuel from his late French period. "Holy Motors," on the other hand, is redundant and, at times, downright unpleasant, and much too impressed with its own cleverness to be of much interest to any but the most esoteric-minded of viewers. But the Paris locales are nice.

A bizarre, enigmatic and brave cinematic return to feature film making from Leos Carax, after a 13 year gap, Holy Motors is a self-consciously low budget odyssey of ambiguous, pseudo-linear intentions. After five years attempting to raise funds for a large budget English language film that ultimately fell through, Carax turned his attentions on a native language film with a smaller cost, and was inspired when observing the many limousines driving around Paris. Regular collaborator Denis Lavant plays the mysterious Monsiuer Oscar, who is driven around the city in the white stretched vehicle, taking him to the variety of "appointments" of the day. The appointments appear to be a series of acting jobs, where Mr Oscar dresses up for the multitude of roles.

From a dishevelled gypsy woman, - through a banker, and a dying millionaire - to a crazed vagabond who kidnaps a fashion model, Kay M. (Eva Mendes), Oscar glides through the day and into the night, changing his appearance with make-up and prosthetics, fulfilling his duty to a mysterious company, accomplishing the jobs he is given information through files in the back of the car. In other scenarios Oscar is dressed in a black leotard with white dots, as he enters a very industrialised building where he performs a motion-capture dance and highly sexualised duo with a red-clad blond woman, as it turns into the serpentine CGI creation; in another, Oscar joins his 2 point 4 family unit, which consist of chimpanzees.

Whilst Carax takes many stylistic references from David Lynch, the film also offers a quite unique sense of humour. In one scene, Oscar is playing a dying rich man, who has his step-niece beside him in his last moments. After dying, Oscar climbs from the bed, the niece still sobbing into the covers, he turns back to ask the girls name, and offering apologies for his swift exit: "I have to get to another appointment" he states, which is returned with the reply that she also needs to leave for another appointment (It's funnier on screen than in writing - and certainly after the incredibly moving moments of death). It's a jarring punch-line to a heartfelt moment. Small details of technological modernity invade the mis-en-scene, for example, when Oscar is the vagabond, he wildly runs through a cemetery eating flowers, each gravestone has its own www.address.

Holy Motors is without question a film about film, and film making, offering allusions to Jean Cocteau and Jean-Luc Godard. Fundamentally though, this film seems to evoke another French original, Georges Franju, whose film Eyes Without a Face (1960) is highly referenced. Edith Scob (who played the masked victim in the film), drives Mr Oscar around, and actually reprises her role, and hides her face once again under the mask. The mysterious events in the film could also be regarded as a comment on changing nature of cinematic production. From the motion capture sequence to the nature of Oscar scatological "job", the film seems to lament the loss of real cinema - Carax filmed in digital video (a format that he hates) for budgetary reasons.

What is so beautiful about this mode of cinema is the complexity of meaning. This is film so dense in symbolism that it requires repeat viewings. Whether it's about the changing face of cinema, the acting profession, or an exploration of the nature of identity (Oscar could represent the many faces that we have to put on each day, in the performance of life, and our increasing need to compartmentalise each element of our lives), it doesn't really matter what the directors true intentions were. This is cinematic experience at a most cerebral level. We are not given the meaning, but we take from it what we bring to it, and can interpret it how we want. Lavant creates a fantastic, multi- faceted performance, even managing to hold an erect penis in the most unsexy environment ever. Kylie Minogue even manges to be perfectly suited for her small role in which she may have been a past lover of Mr Oscar, she also sings a song written by Carax and Neil Hannon, which enlightens a dingy musical movie moment.

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The criticism I'm hearing most about "Holy Motors" is that it's about nothing. That it means nothing. That they - the unhappy viewer - needs more from their movies than random events strewn together without logic. As if the road to nowhere is not interesting in and of itself to them. It makes me wonder, why don't we expect our concept of narrative to be challenged more in the movies we consume? Why don't we put forth as much effort in confronting art, as the artist has put forth in confronting us?

"Holy Motors" is, to me, an act of filmic hypnosis. It made the cinema lover in me immediately and deeply happy from frame one (and not just because it references so much cinema of the past and critiques trends in the cinema of the present). I appreciate that film is not simply just another way of telling a story. Film is painting with light. It features human beings at play. It is design and photography and fashion and imagination. Of all the things cinema embraces... story is just a single element. So how did it become the MOST important element? Or, even more baffling to me, when did our idea of story itself become so tepid?

The story in "Holy Motors" is writ large. It scans like a modern myth. Like the oldest stories the human race tells. It features improbable and fantastical things happening along a journey. Its protagonist is a modern Ulysses trekking through the strange and fabled land of human experience, always searching for home. It is the only story ever told. And yet, again and again I hear people say that the movie has no narrative. No character they can connect to. No meaning.

Just because director Leos Carax is playful and tenuous with "meaning" doesn't mean it's not there. This is a film that is both about the drudgery and the exhilaration of creating for a living. It follows a day in the life of an artist. An artist always on the move. Sometimes that artist is tired, sometimes inspired, sometimes longing, sometimes exactly in the right place at the right time.

A friend I saw it with was bored. I still can't even understand how that's possible. Here's a movie in which anything can happen. In which any image can be juxtaposed with any other. In which the central architecture is not some obscuring three-act structure built out of a tired overplayed premise, but instead, is a careening litany of virtually every possible premise available. It readily teeters from overindulgent spectacle to tiny truth and back again as it explores, but never fusses over, the role of new technology in cinema, complications of identity, the strange job of acting for a living and so much more...

Most importantly though, the movie is about being on the job. The job of being human. Doing the work of being alive.

And we, the viewer, we work too. We work for meaning in the dark of the theater. We work to help fashion the story. To find the true character at the center of the experience. To understand where the human heart falls in all this flailing, anything-goes madness.

Life is work. Art is work. Observing is work. Isn't that beautiful?

"Cinema is a territory. It exists outside of movies. It's a place I live in. It's a way of seeing things, of experiencing life. But making films, that's supposed to be a profession." - Leos Carax

The film is a parade of pseudo-intellectual claptrap, a mere montage of disjointed oddity; it has no direction, it just presents the viewer with one weird, meaningless image after another. I derive no positive emotion from a film that relies solely on ambiguous subtext, surrealism and symbolism.

I began to lose faith in the film by the 40 minute mark, each minute after that began to drag severely. There are scenes that are well acted and quite touching, but when they're thrown into this mess they're completely wasted. Some people have been flabbergasted by the suggestion that it's 'boring', I don't see what's so surprising about that, how can you be engaged by something that's so utterly meaningless?

Some people have praised its imagery, waffling on about how it 'celebrates the medium'. I agree it's striking and unconventional, but that's all it is; the best films achieve in both celebrating the medium of film and delivering strong, engaging narratives, whether they're simple or complex. Any idiot can throw together two hours of sheer meaningless oddity and claim it to be 'metaphorical' - it's weak filmmaking.

Even fans of the film have no idea what's going on, however many of them seem to relish mustering up their own vague, self-aggrandising interpretations of it. Although there are those who genuinely enjoy such ambiguity and have an honest approach to analysing the film, there are many that don't.

These are people who are likely to fiercely defend the film. Typically, they will label the film's critics ignoramuses who need their narratives to be 'spoon-fed' to them. I cringe to think about the scores of obnoxious pseuds who will attempt to revel in the utter poppycock that 'Holy Motors' serves by the shovel load.