Holy Motors slaps you in the face, has you laughing yourself silly, and confounds you near-continuously. Best to give in and roll with the punches. There are a lot of things it isn’t–mainly a film with only one “correct” interpretation. Best to consider it an exhilarating ride to an unclear destination or, if you will, a surrealistic trip that actually renders the destination irrelevant. In a year when Daniel Day-Lewis and John Hawkes have given virtual acting clinics, former acrobat Denis Lavant throws down what may be the most extraordinary performance of all. Director Leos Carax takes David Lynch-, David Cronenberg-, and Luis Bunuel-style filmmaking to new heights as he comes up with what feels like a practically new art form.
Holy Motors is possibly the dream of the character in the opening scene (Lavant) who wakes up, flamboyantly uses a key grafted onto his finger to open a mysterious door to a movie theater full of viewers of a silent movie, then walks down the aisle with his dog. What follows is a tycoon, Monsieur Oscar (Lavant), leaving his gated house and stepping into a stretch limousine (forget any comparison to Cronenberg’s subpar Cosmopolitan, which also takes place in a limo). In the first of, I think, eleven “appointments,” Monsieur Oscar, using a makeup table in the limo, dons the proper getup to transform himself into an old beggar woman, leaves the limo to go out into Paris and bum some change, then returns to the limo to take on the next character. Before we know it, he’s transformed into a one-eyed, out-to-lunch loco (a character first introduced by Carax and Lavant in the collection of shorts, Tokyo!), who, in an absolute tizzy, pops out of a sewer and abducts a model (Eva Mendes) at a photo shoot in a cemetery. He bites off the fingers of a cameraman assistant, licks an impassive Mendes’ armpit, and proceeds to eat her cash while taking her to an underground lair where, using her own clothes, he will turn her into a Muslim woman. A cemetery gravestone announces, “Visit my website.”
Later he’s a man in a body-stocking with glowing motion-capture sensors who pantomimes the sex act , an assassin taking out his own double, a father counseling his teenage daughter, a man on a deathbed with the same dog from earlier sitting nearby, a hitman going after a businessman in a restaurant, and a reunited lover having a tryst with a Jean Seberg-lookalike (pop star Kylie Minogue), who belts into a melodramatic song, “Who Were We” (co-written by Carax), before hurling herself off the balcony of the deserted Samaritaine department store. Somewhere along the line a parade of serenading accordion players saunter through a church in a bit of comic relief only heightened by the interlude’s sheer poignancy.
Throughout the film Oscar’s limo driver (veteran French actress Edith Scob) keeps asking whether he’s had anything to eat and if he hasn’t had enough activity for one day. French icon actor Michel Piccoli, as an overseeing manager of sorts, steps into the limousine to ask Oscar why he keeps on going. “For beauty of the act,” he says. The beauty of Carax’s act is in the marvelous images, their uncanny interconnectedness, and the unique questions they raise. What might have seemed in a lesser film an exercise in style with little mooring in substance, here confidently stakes its purpose on the most iconoclastic of notions: throw out the rules and expectations and let pure cinema flow. Linear plot and film conventions? Never heard of them. Carax, 51, has only made five feature films in 28 years–he faces a tough job to follow Holy Motors.
4.5 Exhilarating and Confounding “Appointments” (out of 5)