Film Review
Who'd have thought that the most highly rated French film of 2011 would
turn out to be an old-fashioned black and white silent film made in
Hollywood? An even more unlikely prospect is in sight for
2012.
Judging by the critical reaction it has garnered so far,
the most acclaimed French film of 2012 looks like being a surreal low
budget oddity featuring Kylie Minogue, chimpanzees and a man who thinks
he is Lon Chaney.
Holy Motors
marks the long-awaited return of director Leos Carax, who appears to
have been in deep hibernation since the critical and commercial failure
of his last full-length film
Pola X
(1999). Feted as one of the most promising young filmmakers of
his generation after his first two attention-grabbing films,
Boy Meets Girl (1984) and
Mauvais
sang (1986), Carax's career fell into a swift decline when
his most ambitious film,
Les Amants du Pont-Neuf (1991),
failed to recoup more than fraction of its massive production
cost. Now Carax is back, reborn, revitalised and raring to
unleash his unique creative vision on an unwary cinema audience.
French cinema will never be the same again, if his zany comeback
feature is anything to go by. The Second Coming is upon us, so be
ready.
If
Holy Motors does emerge as
the top French film of the year, it has certainly earned it. It
is a complete one-off, a brilliant surreal oddity that simultaneously
celebrates the entire cinematic tradition (in all its rich diversity)
whilst plunging with careless insouciance into some of the most
profound metaphysical conundra known to man. As the film flits
from genre to genre like a manic channel-hopper it takes us on the most
frenetic cinematic mystery tour ever, challenging and entertaining
its audience in roughly equal measure. In this film, Carax
achieves in just under two hours pretty much what Jean-Luc Godard spent
four and half soul-destroying hours trying (and failing) to do with his
mammoth
Histoire(s) du cinéma,
and does it without driving his entire audience to suicide.
Holy Motors is a film that is as
profound or as daft as you want it to be - a supremely intelligent
homage to the art of cinema or a criminally enjoyable piece of escapist
nonsense. Either way, it will leave you with a (bewildered) smile
on your face and a deep yearning for more of the same.
As to what the film really means, that is anyone's guess. Even
Carax himself doesn't seem to be able to answer that one. "Beauty
is in the eye of the beholder", says a sinister-looking man with a
conspicuous port-wine stain (Michel Piccoli), prompting the question:
what happens to beauty when there is no one to see it? This is
surely the biggest clue as to what the film is about: the relationship
between art and life. The prologue would seem to endorse this
interpretation. Here, a man stirs from his bed and wanders in a
somnambulistic state through a secret passageway into a cinema hall
filled with people watching a film. It is surely no coincidence
that the sleepwalker is played by Carax himself (credited,
significantly, as The Dreamer). Apart from making a humorous
allusion to his long absence from our screens, Carax is reminding us
that there is no separation between life and art - these are merely two
manifestations of the same underlying truth, a universal creative
imperative from which all vitality springs.
Cinema is the most dreamlike of all the arts but it is also the art
form that feels closest to reality. By throwing out the
conventions of cinema with manic glee and muddying the waters between
fantasy and reality,
Holy Motors
boldly asserts what we know to be true but dare not admit: that there
is no barrier between art and life, and neither is there one between
life and death. Delete one of the 'O's in the film's title
(as Carax does in the film's final scene) and we get an anagram of Holy
Morts - a reminder that the dead are merely shadows of the living, just
as art is a shadow of life (or vice versa). This is the kind of
migraine-inducing metaphysical contortion that
Holy Motors forces you into if you
take it too seriously. (Maybe it's best to take a few stiff
drinks beforehand and just sit back and laugh at all the funny bits.)
It is infinitely easier to describe what the film consists of than to
say what it is meant to be about.
Holy Motors is constructed as a
series of unrelated vignettes in which
the central character, Monsieur Oscar, assumes a variety of
roles, changing his appearance to fit the situation like an actor
assuming various guises in a series of short plays. When we first
meet Oscar, he appears to be a respectable businessman, being driven
around Paris in his smart stretch limousine by an enigmatic female
chauffeur. But Oscar's appointments are far from what we might
expect and before he leaves the car he gets out his makeup box and,
before our eyes, he becomes a completely different person. Oscar
is clearly a kindred spirit of Fantômas and Lon Chaney, a man of
a thousand faces and a fetish for latex. First he is a bedraggled
female tramp, then he is an attentive family man; later he is a hired
assassin and a dying old man. At one point, he puts on a
tight-fitting catsuit and performs an erotic dance with a female
partner in a high tech motion capture studio. In another
sequence, he becomes Monsieur Merde (a character borrowed from Carax's
contribution to the 2008 anthology film
Tokyo!), a hideous sewer sprite who
abducts an attractive young woman (Eva Mendes) and subjects her to his
X-rated reinterpretation of Jean Cocteau's
Belle et la bête.
Who is Monsieur Oscar? Who is he working for? Why does he
go through this elaborate routine? These are just three of the
seventy million or so questions that pop into our heads as we watch the
film and which Carax stubbornly refuses to answer.
It is telling that the main character is named Oscar, since Leos Carax
is an anagram of Alex (the director's real first name) and Oscar (the
award he presumably intends to win one day).
It is equally fitting that Oscar should be played by Denis Lavant, an actor who has
appeared in all but one of Carax's films and is (logically) his alter
ego. Lavant is a fine actor in his own right but he is
particularly well-suited for Carax's unpredictable, off-kilter
universe. There are not many actors who could take on a dozen or
so wildly contrasting roles in the same film and give them all separate, clearly
defined identities (to the point that you could easily imagine they
were played by different people). As Lavant changes his
appearance, so he completely changes the tone of the film, and it is
with graceful ease that he steers us from one genre to another, from
melodrama, to film noir thriller, to musical comedy and so forth,
holding our attention like a master hypnotist or someone about to
attack us with a very sharp meat cleaver.
What are we to make of Monsieur Oscar's performances? One
interpretation is that they represent a series of fantasies that the
filmmaker conceives, parallel lives into which he projects himself and
from which he derives inspiration for his films. Another is that
they represent the multiple facets of our own lives, lives that are
made up of a series of mini-plays in which we adopt a different persona
to match the occasion. In film and literature, identity has
become one of the most important themes of our era, but what Carax
appears to be saying is that we have innumerable identities, or perhaps
none at all. We become what the situation demands, like a
chameleon blending in with its surroundings. If we have any
identity at all, it is one that is infinitely variable, an identikit
that allows us to become whoever or whatever we desire. We are
everyone and we are no one.
For the part of the mysterious chauffeur, Carax cast Edith Scob, partly
to recompense her for having deleted all of her scenes from
Les Amants du Pont-Neuf, but mainly
so that he can include a cheeky reference to the actress's most famous
role in Georges Franju's
Les Yeux sans visage (1960),
the greatest of all French horror films.
Other cinema references
abound and are too many to catch in a single viewing (or even ten
viewings) of the film. Suffice it to say that Luis Buñuel,
Jean Cocteau, Jacques Demy and Jean-Luc Godard all get a generous
look-in as Carax crafts the most gloriously self-indulgent homage to
cinema money can buy. Who better than Kylie Minogue to resurrect
the spirit of Jean Seberg in an unashamedly kitsch nod to the big
Hollywood musical? Throw in the odd reference to Etienne-Jules
Marey, Charlie Chaplin, Eugène Ionesco, Samuel Beckett, Henry James and King Kong
and you have some idea what a bizarre and varied culture binge this is.
Leos Carax's original motivation for making
Holy Motors was quite modest -
essentially, it was just to alert the world to the fact that he was (a)
still alive and (b) preparing to get back into the filmmaking
saddle. Even though he intended it to be a low budget production
from the outset, Carax still had enormous difficult finding a financial
backer. The spectacular failure of Carax's last two features had
made him as attractive an investment prospect as an Icelandic bank, but
somehow he managed to raise 3.8 million euros - a derisory budget which
forced him to drop his long-held aversion to digital photography.
The tight budget may have been a blessing in disguise, as it not only
galvanised Carax's creativity, it also helped to restrain his famed
penchant for cinematic grandiloquence. When the film premiered at
Cannes in May 2012 it met with a rapturous reception - it may not have
won the Palme d'Or but it was honoured with the Prix de la Jeunesse
(Youth Award), the same prize that Carax received in 1984 for his debut
feature
Boy Meets Girl
(1984). Since,
Holy Motors
has drawn critical acclaim across the world and achieves far more than
its director could possibly have hoped for. Leos Carax is back,
and it looks as if he could be around for some time...
© James Travers 2012
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Next Leos Carax film:
Mauvais sang (1986)