Holy Motors

Synopsis: Monsieur Oscar (Denis Lavant) is a shadowy character who travels in a stretch limo from one appointment to another, chauffeured by his trusty driver Céline (Edith Scob). After leaving “home”, Oscar takes on the look and persona of a diverse assortment of characters – among them a businessman, a female beggar, a hit-man, a sewer-dwelling quasi-monster, a punitive father and a dying man. What is real? Who is Oscar? And what the hell is this movie about?

Director Leos Carax plays with our perceptions from the opening scene of this film as a pyjama-clad male awakes to find himself in a hallucinatory state, eventually moving through a door in his wall into a cinema. There follows a series of episodes with each suggesting a different film genre and with nods to other films, thereby inviting us to contemplate that the power of cinema to create alternate realities and alternate personae.

We never know what person we will see as Oscar emerges from the limo, fitted out like a theatrical dressing-room, for his next “appointment”. One especially visually-striking scene is when he is kitted-out in a body suit, with infra-red electronic markers, and we watch him and a similarly-attired woman indulge in a sort of sensuously amorous dance. From that incarnation he then becomes a filthy Rasputin-like tramp, with the repugnant name of Monsieur Merde. He rocks up to a photo shoot, abducts the glamorous model (Eva Mendes), and some seriously freaky stuff involving flowers, erections, and a recreation of the Pietà goes down.  You might be getting a sense of this remarkably quirky and challenging film.

Much praise must go to Denis Levant’s astonishing performance in which he embodies so many different characters as well as to the ingenious make-up department and the evocative cinematography. There is also a frisson of local pride to be had as Kylie Minogue turns up in a fascinating vignette, shows that she can act, and sings an archetypically French song with feeling.

Holy Motors, a worthy nominee for this year’s Palme D’Or and Carax’s only fifth film in 28 years, is an exercise in surrealism and any expectation of a neatly packaged meaning is beside the point. The film is more a stimulus to reflection on reality and identity  The spare dialogue makes veiled references to the nature of existence and our perception of it. A song towards the film’s end says “We would love to live again”, thus inviting us to once more examine the possibilities of who we could have been, something which Oscar seems to be living in his daily “work”.

Despite its obscurity, I found myself fascinated and eventually drawn in by this film which manages to convey a dreamlike state of imagination and put on screen possibilities far removed from mundane human existence.

 

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