The old “identity-as-performance” and “world-as-a-stage” chestnut gets a fresh wild spin in Holy Motors, the audacious new provocation from Leos Carax that thrilled and killed at Cannes back in May and that now reaches British shores with a considerable weight of expectation. Consistently confounding, endlessly - perhaps excessively - inventive, Holy Motors is the walking definition of an acquired taste, out-doing even Guy Maddin’s Keyhole as the year’s most mercurial movie mind-fuck, even if it fails to win its way through to the emotional ambush that Maddin’s ghosts-and-gangsters opus managed to achieve - for this viewer, at least. Still, for all its indulgences, longueurs and elements that feel less like ideas than affectations, Holy Motors proves an indelible experience and one whose heady and perverse pleasures I hope that British audiences will embrace - including those lured in solely by the (somewhat over-hyped) appearance of the nation’s favourite Aussie.
Conceptually, the movie is a cinephile wet dream, riffing around French and American film history from Etienne-Jules Marey’s early scientific human-movement studies to cutting-edge CGI as it traces a day in the life of (the rather cutely-monikered) Monsieur Oscar (Denis Lavant). (Why not Monsieur César, non?) Driven around Paris in a stretch limo by the unflappable Céline (Edith Scob), with the car serving as his dressing-room-cum-sanctuary of sorts, Oscar is given a series of “assignments” to fill out his day. These involve him venturing into the real world [sic!] in a variety of guises, from elderly beggar-woman to concerned père, motion-capture cipher to hair-munching sewer-sprite. In between these duties, Oscar waxes philosophical with a shady geezer (Michel Piccoli) and meets an old flame, Jean (Kylie Minogue), who - like him; like all of us? - has her own separate set of performative assignments to fulfil. Full review at Kubrick on the Guillotine.
funnily enough I saw the trailer for this film last night....
ReplyDeleteand was amused by the audience who collectively sucked on their teeth!
Mixed feelings I take it, I think this type of film will do that. Nonetheless, with words like "Consistently confounding, endlessly - perhaps excessively - inventive" I'm looking forward to the experience. I just hope it isn't too sterile an exercise, more concerned with cleverness than emotion.
ReplyDelete@John - The fools!
ReplyDelete@Chris I very much look forward to reading your take. Overall I'm in the "pro" camp, though there were sections that irritated me. But any film that signs off by thanking Franju *and* James gets my vote. :-)
Holy Motors has finally reached American shores, so I was curious to see it, having read many recommendations. It's one of those films that I think I'll enjoy more in retrospect (like David Lynch's Mulholland Drive) since it combines and comments on acting/creation, daily performativity, the dream world, and autobiography simultaneously. I suppose it takes time to line up those various strands as a viewer, something that's impossible to do when one is actually watching the film. Knowing about the suicide of the director's wife makes me think about Kylie Minogue's scene from a new angle. Horrible things can happen to us, and in a way it's like we're forced through them just as actors are forced through difficult scenes in a film, and yet those experiences look quite different on film than they do in real life, even if they feel equally surreal.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the comment, Jason. Yes, it’s "one for retrospect" - and, I guess, for repeat viewings - definitely. Some of it drove me a little nuts at the time, and I’m not entirely sure that it’s quite as profound as some people seem to think it is, but a few sequences are absolutely unforgettable, no doubt about it. And bravo, Monsieur Lavant.
ReplyDeleteI hadn’t heard about Carax’s wife’s suicide. Oh boy. Certainly gives another chilling dimension to that scene…
Has KEYHOLE surfaced in the States yet?
Some of it drove me a little nuts at the time, and I’m not entirely sure that it’s quite as profound as some people seem to think it is, but a few sequences are absolutely unforgettable, no doubt about it. And bravo, Monsieur Lavant.
ReplyDelete500k Motors