NYFF 2012: "Holy Motors"

I was a little taken aback by the ebullient social media response from this year's Cannes Film Festival to Leos Carax's first feature in over a decade. Aside from the usual deplorable over-familiarity—I don't recall if anyone actually stated "Oh, that Leos," but, might as well—the reports of its imaginative ebullience gave a weird sense that those of the assembled who chose to laud the picture were also ready to coronate Carax as the new "roi du crazy." And the Leos Carax I personally value is not really an inordinately "wacky" guy.

So I was pleased and relieved to find Holy Motors a largely downbeat, even mordant film. Its opening scene, in which lead actor Denis Lavant has a metal key in the place of one of his fingers, Motors is not particularly "surreal" or hallucinatory. Particularly once one settles in with its conceit, which is not presented in an insistently enigmatic fashion. Lavant's character is referred to throughout by his chauffeur Celine (Edith Scob) as "Monsieur Oscar" as she drives him in a ridiculous white stretch limo (any resemblance to DeLillo/Cronenberg's Cosmopolis is likely coincidental but not entirely unpropitious) to a series of "appointments" in which Oscar, in a variety of outfits and makeup contrivances, emerges from the limo to "act" and interact with people who may be ordinary Parisians or who may be other "actors." One of Oscar's most memorable incarnations is as the "Merde" monster that Lavant previously played in Carax's droll installment in the 2008 omnibus film Tokyo! (the last picture Carax made; his prior feature is 1999's Pola X). Here he rampages through a Pere Lachaise festooned with headstones reading "Visit My Website" and eventually kidnaps a model in Cocteau-esque makeup played by Eve Mendes. In a sense, yes, there is something funny about an overhead shot of the legendary Parisian cemetery underscored by Ifukube's Gojira themes, but in a larger sense, there's something not at all funny about it. That larger sense being, perhaps, among other things, that of a hurt and spiteful grown-up child  reluctantly sharing old enthusiasms. Holy Motors has been touted as a celebration of or love letter to cinema, but throughout all of its allusions I senses something like an exhausted renunciation. Oscar's day of appointments wears on, and his assignments take in murdering a doppelganger (or two), upbraiding a socially awkward teenage daughter (the way a cramped, constipated Sparks song abuts a breezy Kylie Minogue hit on the soundtrack in this sequence speaks volumes), dying old in bed, and reminiscing with an old love who may or may not be "real" (played by the aforementioned Minogue, in a very affecting performance). And all the while he's drinking more and more, falling into depression and disillusionment (when he looks in his folder and sees his assignment to play Merde, the virtuosic Lavant, I mean Oscar, mutters "Merde" and I don't think he's just noting the character); he even gets a visit from a superior (played by the legend Michel Piccoli) who wonders whether the performer's heart is in it anymore. And at the end, Oscar is delivered to a new home with a new family, and the constitution of that family, while again kind of funny on the surface of it, can also be read as a very determined "fuck you" to the entire prior enterprise.

The love letter aspect is confirmed for some by the fact that at the beginning and end Carax intercuts into the picture some motion-study footage by 19th-century cinema pioneer Étienne-Jules Marey; to them, this and other references (Scob's iconic role in Franju's Eyes Without A Face does not go visually unremarked-upon, for instance) suggest a nod to continuity. To my eyes, the statement these things suggested was "This is so OLD, I am so TIRED of it, but it's ALL I'VE GOT." Of course I could just be projecting here. But throughout the movie, which certainly has its ups and downs (I thought its coda, which nods to It's A Wonderful Life, of all things, was kind of a disaster), I kept thinking, "this is the work of an artist who can't figure out which story he wants to tell, or even if he has a story to tell anymore, and this is the only thread he can grab on to." I did not read the movie's press notes until after the screening I attended, and I was gratified albeit aomehwat saddened to discover therein that I wasn't ENTIRELY wrong, that the impetus for Holy Motors lay at least in part in Carax's mounting frustration at being unable to get project after project off the ground. 

And so, in short, and for better and for worse, un vrai film Carax. And not funsy at all.

UPDATE: I am informed, in typically friendly and helpful fashion by a commenter below, that the figure with the metal key in place of a finger is in fact Carax and not Lavant. And Carax is indeed credited in the film as "the sleeper," so I stand corrected, and by all means do disregard all of the above, which is clearly now nothing save verbal fluff. 

FURTHER UPDATE: But seriously, the distinction as pointed out is significantly thematically pertinent. The sleeper with the key for a finger awakes in the bedroom of an airport hotel; all of Carax's unrealized projects over the years have been outside of France. The door-in-the-wall that his finger-key unlocks leads into a cinema, and it's in that cinema that, it appears, the film that constitutes the remainder of Holy Motors (opening with a very beautiful Tarkovsky-homage shot, incidentally) is screening. So there's almost literally the sense of the picture as a projection/dream of Carax.

Comments

[md'a]

That's Carax in the opening scene, not Levant.

[md'a]

Didn't mean to imply that that small error somehow invalidated everything else you wrote. The film definitely does have a mournful undercurrent, though it's also sometimes riotously funny (the conclusion of the assassin story), bizarrely outré (Merde & Eva), and joyously celebratory (entr'acte). Wouldn't call it "funsy" but it did frequently make me giddy. Same is true of Carax's other films, save perhaps Pola X (which I disliked at the time but need to revisit someday).

[Petey]

"Same is true of Carax's other films, save perhaps Pola X (which I disliked at the time but need to revisit someday)."

I disliked Pola X at the time as well, but it did make me continually delirious, if not giddy. And I respect that, even if I walked out of the theater in a non-funsy mood.

Now, after I get a chance to see Holy Motors, I'd REALLY appreciate if someone would get their act together enough to let me buy HD home cinema versions of Mauvais sang and Boy Meets Girl. I'd really like to see them again.

[Jason M.]

Disliked POLA X when I first saw it, too (on DVD), but then a few years back, Claire Denis presented it as part of a double bill with her own Melville adaptation BEAU TRAVAIL (made at roughly the same time). It played beautifully both in that context and on 35mm (a few aging CGI effects notwithstanding), and made me both reevaluate the film and hunt down the novel.

Either way, it's a shame that it's taken Carax this long to make a feature again. Excited to see it, and hope the next one doesn't take so long to come to fruition.

[David Ehrenstein]

Very much looking forward to this.

I first met Leos during the "Unbearable Lightness of Being" press tour when when he was trailing after Juliette Binoche looking for all the world like a small whipped dog. He was very happy that I wanted to talk to him as apparently none of the U.S. press had the slightest idea who he as. "Les Amants du Pont-Neuf" was still in progress at that time. The next time I ran into him was (inevitably) in the lobby of the Chateau Marmont. I was there to see Gus, but there was Leos -- who invited me to a screening tat evening at Universal in the big room. The film was of course overwhelming -- the greatest cinematic tribute anyone has ever created for his girlfriend. Needless to say the end of shooting signaled the end of the affair. "Les Amants" got a cursory U.S. release a few years later. After that I'd often see Leos at Book Soup on Sunset. He is by nature "triste" and "Holy Motors" is clearly in this mode in spades.

[Bettencourt]

Much as I love this site and Glenn's writing, I often have to put on my "we'll just have to agree to disagree" hat when I come here, because I simply couldn't stand the "Merde" segment of TOKYO. I'd almost rather watch FAY GRIM again (suppresses a shudder). There, I just had to get that off my chest. (Liked the other TOKYO segments, though).