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 dop­pel­gänger (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 19^th-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.