Holy Motors

Dropped by Paul A. Gonter
R, 116 min
Science Fiction/Fantasy, Drama
Written and Directed by:
Leos Carax
Starring: Denis Lavant, Edith Scob, Eva Mendes, Kylie Minogue
Language: French, English
Released: 4 July 2012
Indomina Releasing

A Drive Through Film: Leos Cara’s Holy Motors

“No one wants action,” an anthropomorphized stretch limousine says at the conclusion of Leo Carax’s new film, Holy Motors, his break lights blinking in rhythm with his speech. The vehicle’s statement seems a bit ironic due to the almost 2 hours of continuous action that precedes this scene: from the start, Monsieur Oscar (Denis Lavant), the film’s protagonist (?), is in constant motion around the city of Paris as he travels from appointment to appointment, making it through his trying workday. What will strike the spectator is the peculiarity of his work. His first appointment consists of him dressing like an old beggar woman, hobbling out the back of the limo, standing half bent and struggling to support himself/herself with a cane, and pleading for spare change from those passing by. The most striking quality of this scene is the gulf between M. Oscar as we first see him, silver haired and dressed to the nines in a black suit, and as this decrepit woman—however, while the transition from one to the other is smooth, we watch as M. Oscar begins to apply the adequate makeup, it is drastic in its completeness: the man in the suit and the old woman could not possibly be the same person. But, indeed, they are. They are both M. Oscar as a fictionalized professional imposter, or they are both Denis Lavant as an actor portraying them, or they are both Leos Carax as he brought them to life with movie magic, or, perhaps, they are both just figments of the cinema, ghosts of people, of ideas, flickering, projected lifeless onto a screen. At any rate, action, whether it is that of transformation or transportation, becomes central to Holy Motors’ ability to bring the spectator into a strange world fraught with incongruousness, where time, space, emotion, humor, all those engaging qualities of art, of life, seem to funnel through and burst forth from the screen, unburdened, but still hard to grasp.

Though Carax has pointed out that Holy Motors is not about cinema, that it only uses the language of cinema to tell a science fiction story, which is “more fiction than science,” seeing the film as contained by cinema can help the spectator comprehend the narrative, or the lack thereof.[1] Anyway, it is hard to deny that the film is preoccupied with its own cinematic language, aside from a few clips shown during the credits (which are either motion studies by turn-of-the-century English photographer, Eadweard Muybridge, or direct allusions) the first shot of the film is of an audience watching a film—King Vidor’s The Crowd to be exact. Combined with the fact that M. Oscar’s appointments (either nine or 11, depending on how you view the film) become increasingly aware of themselves as distinct scenes to be acted out, this initial shot stresses the point that we are indeed watching a film that is self-aware of itself as a film. Dear God, there is so much one could say about Carax’s awareness of his mediation as filmmaker, in other words, his consciousness of using cinematic language, and just in the first few minutes alone (!), but I won’t go into that here. Here, all I want to say is: if we, as spectators, see Holy Motors as contained by cinema and not about cinema, then we can look past it as merely self-reflexive (or incompressible, as no doubt some may complain), and see the real humor and anxieties about our modern world that come out through M. Oscar’s experiences.

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For aren’t we, as modern individuals, constantly dealing with our own ability or inability to mediate? From grooming our networked selves on Facebook, LinkedIn, MatchDotCom and other social networking sites, to navigating the ever-expanding stockpile of user-generated content, the snapshots of our’s and other’s lives on YouTube, Flickr, Blogspot, Tumblr and other bottom-up domains, is it not part of our condition to at least notice (maybe more than ever before) how our identities are spread out, dispersed through many forms of representation? How we must be ever aware of ourselves as actors?

Holy Motors embraces this theme in all its complexity, never allowing itself to be wholly cynical or wholly celebratory. Carax knows how to employ the camera beyond simply capturing a moment, and while Holy Motors is less technically indulgent than some of his earlier work (see his feature debut, Boy Meets Girl[2]), it is still proof of his adept eye for nuance, his ability to allow much more than the characters to speak. I find that this attention to nuance allows the story of M. Oscar to straddle the line between over-generalizing and over-individuating experience, and I feel as though the conceit of M. Oscar as actor helps smooth out these extremes. Without the limo, which acts as a mobile dressing room, and its driver, Celine (Edith Scob), the appointments could stand alone as not only unconnected short films, but as unconnected short films of different genres (one of the sequences is actually a continuation of a character Carax invented for his segment in the 2008 anthology Tokyo![3]).

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The limo and M. Oscar’s somewhat ambiguous profession work as a device that allows the film to explore stories as diverse as a man committing murder and a man picking up his daughter from a party, and genres as usually unrelated as science fiction and musical. This should be nothing new to film goers. Especially since earlier this year David Cronenberg’s adaptation of Cosmopolis used a very similar technique. In both films, the limo seems to act as a narrative consciousness that not only transports characters from place to place, but provides a space for them to engage in reflection. It is within these moments that Holy Motors is able to provide a certain level of cohesion between the appointments, which enables the disparate narratives to come into close contact with one another. M. Oscar as a character separate yet connected to the characters he portrays can then be seen as neither a distinct, autonomous individual nor an everyman.

The balance between the narratives is one of the most interesting aspects of the film for me. Especially since Holy Motors can contain so much, a true pastiche, yet not become too thin or too overwhelming, and still function as genuine, whether that be in its humor or in its other emotional and aesthetic appeals. A major byproduct of M. Oscar’s weird, incongruous story is the film’s humor. There seems to be an overarching feeling of satire throughout the film, a satire that moves between the fumbling buffoonery of early slapstick to the deeply ironic and surprisingly poignant social satires of Paddy Chayefsky. I find that this, in part, comes from an uneasy contrast created when surreal events are depicted realistically, something that cinema lends itself to nicely, something that may be connected to Holy Motors’ self-aware use of cinematic language. Similar to the tongue-in-cheek reference of genre films to their own structures, like Daniel Craig’s Bond being introduced to a male Moneypenny in Casino Royale, M. Oskar’s appointments enable Carax to engage playfully with his subjects. Things like death become simultaneously awful, due to their striking visual realism, and funny, due to their lack of finality. In one particular scene, death becomes wholly confused and ironized as a humorous, almost vaudevillian, source of new life; however, framing such humor is a deep anxiety about the legitimacy of experience, and the real world finality of death: an Ouroboros in scare quotes. Maybe that is why, at least in the viewing I attended, the truly absurd parts seemed to elicit the largest reaction; sometimes it is easier just to laugh.

And so, where have we gone? With all this traveling around, with all these transformations, where have we gone? Maybe we haven’t moved; the real work being done by a few hundred feet of celluloid or several gigabytes of digital media going nowhere really, but producing moving images via light on a big screen. And let’s not forget the synchronized sound. No, we cannot forget that! Even though all of this is integral to the movie experience, this sort of theorizing brings us nowhere, obviously, and leaves us with a passive spectator that sits still in a theater and absorbs the film without caring if it was The Last Airbender or Last Tango in Paris. Carax’s Holy Motors fights against the passivity of the spectator, it asks questions without giving straightforward answers, only hints, only glimpses. This forces the spectator to think, to discuss, to take action outside of the theater, beyond the screen. In a way, the onus is then placed on us, and it becomes our decision if we want action or not.

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Watch the trailer for Holy Motors below:

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