HOLY MOTORS

France, 2012, 115 minutes, Colour.
Denis Lavant, Edith Scob, Eva Mendes, Kylie Minogue, Michel Piccoli.
Directed by Leos Karax.

Both Holy Motors and David Cronenerg’s Cosmopolis screened in competition in Cannes 2012. Both of them featured a central character who travels around the city all day with a variety of appointments. At the end of Cosmopolis, Robert Pattinson wonders where all the limousines go for the night. In Holy Motors we see the answer, they all drive to a vast parking lot, Holy Motors, where they blink their lights and have a conversation about how the day has been for them and how they might be destined for the scrap heap. That is the tongue-in-cheek jokey ending for what is one of the strangest of screen rides, serious, comic, sometimes absurd.

Leos Carax has made a number of really offbeat films. He appears at the opening of the film, waking, lighting a cigarette, breaking through a wall into the balcony of a theatre with a full house watching a silent film clip. (A personal reflection: in 2007, guests at the Golden Apricot film festival in Armenia all stayed at the same hotel: Carax sat in the same corner for breakfast the whole week, eating but also smoking incessantly, not talking with anyone and saying that he did not do photos or communication! Much of his film is in this vein. )

Denis Lavant (who starred in several of Carax’s films) is Monsieur Oscar, seen leaving home and family and getting into a white stretch limousine driven by a well-coiffeured chauffeur, Celine (Edith Scob). He has a series of nine appointments. We get a shock when we see him at his make-up mirror. In fact, the interior of the limousine is a dressing-space. He emerges as a hunch-bent beggar and spends time on the streets asking for money. Then it is back into the car and preparation for the next appointment where he emerges in diving gear and enters into an office building.

The whole film goes on from there: a provocative intruding, dressed as a kind of human monster, into a photo-shoot with Eva Mendes and then abducting her into a cave for a graphic sexual encounter. For another appointment, he goes into a garage with a mission to kill a worker who turns out to be a mirror image of himself. He also shoots a banker at a street restaurant.

It is all performance, performance art, the love of acting and taking on a diversity of roles. There was a Bacharach-David? song, The Dreams of the Everyday Housewife. These appointments are enactments of the fantasies of the everyday man taken to extremes. Many of them are confronting, even affronting to sensitivities. Many of them are beguilingly beautiful and ugly. They are always intriguing even if sometimes unpleasant.

Audiences have to be patient for Kylie Minogue’s appearance. It comes late in the film. Quite an effective performance from her, looking attractively middle-aged, in a sequence which may be more realistic than the others. One of the final appointments, Monsieur Oscar as a dying old man with a grieving young woman, has more pathos than the others. But, Carax has decided that the whole thing should be sent up with a midnight appointment – with monkeys. Celine takes the limousine back to Holy Motors and then dons a mask as she returns to her ‘real life’.

French, creative, ugly, confronting – might as well use the word phantasmagoria to describe this (very) adult variation on going through the looking glass of performance.

1. The work of Leos Karax? Writing and direction? His offbeat career? Particular eccentricities? His knowledge of cinema – and his homage to French cinema?

2. The impact of the visuals, the great variety, editing and pace? The musical score, songs and their range?

3. The structure of the film: the introduction, the travelling in the car, changing into costumes, into different characters, the cumulative effect of the episodes? The epilogue with the cars talking to each other?

4. The introduction, Karax himself in bed, waking, smoking, going to the wall, going through the door, into the cinema, seeing the audience, their watching the film, the silent film and the homage to the pioneers of film-making and action in motion?

5. Monsieur Oscar and his home, his farewell to his family, his seemingly ordinary life? Breakfast? The briefcase and his going to work? The bodyguards? The family farewell? Celine as his driver? The limousine? In the Paris streets, the other traffic? His business and agenda?

6. The revelation of the acting, makeup, the transformation, the boss and the commission? The list of orders and characters he was to portray? Performance art? The effect? Bringing fantasies to life? The reality and unreality of the performances?

7. Becoming the beggar, his being bent, walking, his being ignored, begging?

8. Travelling and changing into diving gear, the stop-motion episode, going through the building?

9. Becoming the monster, in the streets, the people, looking at the model, the photography, his interrupting the shoot? The photographer’s response? His ugliness, sinister? Abducting the actress, taking her through the tunnels? His brutish behaviour, sexuality, stripping, arousal, posing? The participation of the model?

10. The episode of the killing, the garage, his being familiar to the people, the disguise, the confrontation – and his alter-ego? The fight, killing, the victim and the other self? Twins?

11. The bank, the streets, the restaurant, the attack and the shooting in the street?

12. The crash, the two performers, the twenty years after meeting, Kylie Minogue and her Jean Seberg style? The roof, comparing notes, the regrets, the song, leaving, the nature of the appointment, the man and his suicide? The singer and the suicide?

13. The accordion playing? The verve of this episode? The change of mood?

14. His becoming the old man, going to the hotel, into the room, dying, the girl visiting, the protest and the pathos?

15. The role of Celine, her driving, collaborating with Monsieur Oscar, concern about drink, meals? Finally delivering him home?

16. The family, middle-class – and the revelation of the apes?

17. The end of the day, the limousine returning, to Holy Motors, the cars talking to each other, expressing their fears?

18. Celine, her return, the removal of the mask? The silent film?

19. Themes of the variety of aspects of human nature – presented in imaginative cinematic ways, in the French cinema tradition?