Holy Motors

Leos Carax comes back after a 13 year hiatus to present us with a beautifully weird, absurdist film, which is both 'a tribute to cinema' as well as 'an ode to film (celluloid)'. It doesn't have a linear story or much of a plot, and doesn't make much sense in its entirety. But there's something oddly delightful about it, and keeps you intrigued till the very end. It is unlike anything one has seen before. There are various film references in the movie which would keep cinephiles amazed.

Shakespeare says, "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players; they have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts." This movie is like a literal adaptation of that text; it follows an actor named Mr. Oscar, who dons one role after the other, in actual settings, in front of seemingly invisible cameras. It compares an actor's roles to real-life roles, and the themes tackled are similar too - love, sex, despair, death, etc. And in his journey, we also come across various genres of films.

What does it mean to be an actor? How is it costing one? Till what does one have to go to make it feel authentic? These are just few of the questions it makes us wonder. And other than the screenplay, it's the brilliant performance of talented actor Denis Lavant that makes us wonder that. All the sequences have something to offer; they move you, make you laugh, or make you think.

Few notable film references: - 'Mon Oncle' (the interior of first house) - 'Lovers on the Bridge' (Beggar sequence, La Samaritaine) - 'Mauvais Sang' (motion-capture sequence with red & white lines scrolling in the background) - 'Tokyo!' (the pseudo-leprechaun Merde; he also eats sushi before performing it) - monster movies like 'King Kong' and 'Godzilla' (Merde picking up the model; the original score from 'Godzilla') - 'Underground' (Accordion scene) - 'Breathless' (The name 'Jean', as in Jean Seberg, Kylie Minogue's hairstyle, the mention about lost baby, suicidal tendency) - 'The Umbrellas of Cherbourg' (Kylie's singing sequence) - 'Cremaster 5' (Kylie's dive backwards from the building) - 'Max Mon Amour' (being married to monkey) - 'Eyes Without a Face' (the same actress, the same mask), which is both 'a tribute to cinema' as well as 'an ode to film (celluloid)'. It doesn't have a linear story or much of a plot, and doesn't make much sense in its entirety. But there's something oddly delightful about it, and keeps you intrigued till the very end. It is unlike anything one has seen before. There are various film references in the movie which would keep cinephiles amazed.

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.

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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Holy Motors is like a more out-there version of the films of Charlie Kaufman. You should expect surreal surprises, and my advice would be to not read too much about it before watching it, so you can just let the film happen to you, like an art experience. Don't expect this story of a man (a fully committed Denis Lavant) taking on 9 different personas in a day in Paris to make any neat logical sense, this is a film of dreams and ideas - music, madness, death, sex, despair and comedy. It seems to be about questions around acting - what does it mean to be an actor? aren't we all playing the part of our own lives? what does performing a role cost us? how does a performance manage to move us so intensely? I saw this at the Sydney Film Festival with a large audience, and it was interesting listening to people's laughter. Sometimes that was in response to a comic scene, but at other times it seemed more that a startling idea or image left some people not knowing how else to respond (eg a very odd short scene near the end, as Denis ends his workday, caused some people to laugh, while I found it terribly moving). The delight is in the individual scenes, though some of the scenarios have a real sadness to them: the motion capture scene, where human movement proves spellbinding in a way that CGI can never be; the sad tale of the daughter returning home after a party; the wonderfully crazed and uncomfortable Eva Mendes segment (make sure you check out the writing on the gravestones); and the surprisingly dramatic scene featuring pop icon Kylie Minogue (whose other film appearances were never anything like this). The tone and quality isn't consistent the whole way through, which can feel like a flaw, but it also keeps you on your toes. You might find parts of it pretentious or difficult to interpret, but the next moment you may be moved and not know why. It will definitely make most of the films you've watched recently seem very very dull.