Holy Motors (Leos Carax, 2012)

[beamish13]

A U.S. schedule must have recently been posted, because I remember looking for showtimes last week and there was nothing. Here it is!

Playing in L.A. at the same time as the new print of Pialat's WE WON'T GROW OLD TOGETHER. Nice!

[mfunk9786]

History adds that before or after dying he found himself in the presence of God and told Him:
“I who have been so many men in vain want to be one and myself.”

The voice of the Lord answered from a whirlwind:
“Neither am I anyone; I have dreamt the world as you dreamt your work, my Shakespeare, and among the forms in my dream are you, who like myself are many and no one.”

If not for Paul Thomas Anderson's unshakeable The Master, Holy Motors would so easily be the best film of 2012. My wife (who hated it, along with the two other people we saw it with) feels it was a love letter to film actors, and I think that's a sad, glib conclusion to leap to. Holy Motors is so much more than that. It's a cautionary tale of a world without rest. It's like it was made by a vampire! Okay wait - let me explain. Do you know how vampires are always pouting in contemporary books, films, and television - trying to explain to their mortal friends what is so miserable about living forever? They try so desperately to put to words what can apparently only be put to film - and Leos Carax has done so with a sharp talent and unique approach that'd make Luis Buñuel blush. Holy Motors is a film that shows us a universe in which God is a transportation method that takes one from existence to existence, leaving only scant few minutes for human beings (the one in this film played by Denis Lavant) to rest. Instead of living their lives, they are stuck in a loop - even when they're dropped off at 'home' at night to go to sleep - they jump from existence to existence to existence as the days wear on. As not to spoil the existences we're shown in the film, I'll just make some up to give you an idea of what I'm talking about. In a day, one could go from a cannibalistic eskimo, to an angry insurance broker, to a humble family man who's just gotten home from work, to an adventurer who's just touched down from a balloon flight around the world, to a thief who's decided to kill his deceptive former partner in crime. These transitions are bridged in the most cinematic and mind-boggling way possible, and I daren't spoil it here. As the film goes on, Lavant's character's exhaustion is not hidden from the viewer. Anyone who wishes to live a million lifetimes may want to take in this cautionary tale first. If you don't appreciate the rut you're stuck in, the job you have to go to, the warm bed you have to come home to - you sure will after taking the wild ride that is Holy Motors. This is the most scenic of all scenic roads that've ever been taken to reach the most universal and life-affirming of destinations, and I'm so lucky that Carax let me sit in the passenger's seat.

[Cold Bishop]

Did you try easing your wife in with Carax's earlier romances?

[LQ]

This was our first Carax film, Cold Bishop.

Hate is a strong word; after all, I did tear a 2 for "fair" on my ballot, mfunk

I think that, much like The Master, this is a film that will be a lot of different things to a lot of different people, and while I'm glad that mfunk responded so deeply to it, the only angle I can take on Holy Motors to make it seem somewhat worthwhile to me is to see it as an exploration and deconstruction of the acting craft, and that itself is an idea that works better in theory than in practice here. My take on it may be glib because I find it a glib film. It so very portentously wears all its meandering existential, philosophical themes on its sleeve that it comes off as insincere and hollow at its core. I was actually enjoying it up to a point, there's a lot to like in certain scenes. Surely it'll prove to be catnip for some. Most, even. Just didn't do it for me.

[Cold Bishop]

This was our first Carax film, Cold Bishop.

Hopefully not your last.

[John Edmond]

I have to admit I think Holy Motors is the opposite of portentousness - big themes handled in a manner verging on slapstick rather than trite themes lumbered with a Zimmer score.

Don't do Pola X next.

[LQ]

I have to admit I think Holy Motors is the opposite of portentousness - big themes handled in a manner verging on slapstick rather than trite themes lumbered with a Zimmer score.

Don't do Pola X next.

Perhaps portentous was the wrong word. Let me try again...you'll forgive me if I can't quite articulate why this film didn't work for me in a coherent manner!

After a certain point, it became tedious to watch Denis Lavant (however vividly) enter into the next role only for the end result of commenting, "this is yet another role he shall embody". In effect, it was a hollow exercise before it even started: in trying to illuminate the extraordinary effort and imagination that an excellent actor brings to a role, and the toll that it takes on him to slip in and out of fully formed individuals for the benefit of the director (and of course the almighty audience), Carax fails to make each "appointment" resonate on its own. After said certain point, I felt the device was distancing and counter-intuitive to his aims, and felt myself falling further and further away from the film.

I would be interested in other Carax/Lavant films, though. This is undeniably the work of a talented, interesting director. And, I should mention that the

Spoiler

accordion scene

was one of my favorite scenes of any movie this entire year.

[John Edmond]

Mine too. And I think, Lavant's closest (though not quite) to his role in Les amants du Pont-Neuf there.

No, asides from the portentous quibble you're being perfectly articulate (which sounds patronising as I write it, not intended). I think the difference is I tried to embrace Holy Motors for its shagginess as much as its thematic consistency. And now I'm the inarticulate one. It's an exuberant elegy and both parts are equally important to the film.

[Markson]

New American trailer. Pretty, pretty wild.

[zedz]

I think the 'all about acting' interpretation is a bit of a straitjacket (though that's clearly one of Carax's leaping-off points), and mfunk's onto a more promising line of enquiry thinking about The Modern Condition - but it's also all about cinema, perpetually evolving in response to technological change, both hostile and liberating (and often one and the same thing). In all of these dimensions, though, it's a melancholy film, and the home you go back to at the end of the day is just another role, your real home lost forever in the eternal shuffle, if it ever even existed.

[Black Hat]

Unfamiliar with Carax prior to seeing Holy Motors but, I felt this was fantastic. The transitions instead of being simply confusing or odd for the sake of being odd was deftly handled with humor that for me felt imminently connected to the plight of the human condition, meaning the roles people find themselves playing in life. Like a philosopher giving short stories of scenarios to explain the point they are trying to make through choices the people they are describing have to make. I also interpreted it as very much a homage to cinema as they were short vignettes of other films exploring themes of love, loss, outcasts, isolation, arrogance, parenthood and so forth spliced to together in a larger context of who or what human beings really are.

Spoiler

The aforementioned accordion scene is a direct take off from the band Beirut's 'Cheap Magic Inside'. As a big fan of Beirut's I can not say how excited I was when I saw that scene so if you guys enjoyed that scene I'm sure you'll love this. http://youtu.be/f6TCjgeD8Us" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

As much as I loved the film I'm still not sure what exactly went on. Was the getting stabbed and collapsing in front of the limo a part of 'the act'? What of the relationship with Kylie Minogue, was that real? I'm of the mind that it was but, her jumping to her death was not part of 'the act'? What of the daughter? At first I thought it was real but, by the end of the movie I felt it was another act.

Maybe none of the answers to these questions matter anyway. What an extraordinary film.

[tenia]

Spoiler

I tend to think that the stabbing stuff was a contract, but that there has been a real love story with Kylie Minogue.

[warren oates]

If you only see one surreal limousine road movie by a major auteur this year, let it be this one. This bold, vital and visionary film that may not be entirely coherent or successful but that, even when it misses, swings for the fences with more oomph and brio than most other films I've seen this year.

The film is surely about acting, but it's not only about that. I think that what's both so potent and puzzling to people about the film is that it's not clearly or literally a metaphor for any one particular aspect of the human condition, but instead an opening on to many conflicting facets of modernity, identity, city life, work, performance and the production and consumption of art. At first, Levant's "character" prowls the city anonymously gliding from appointment to appointment, transforming himself for each new job with something of the energy and the exhaustion of a high-class prostitute, servicing clients whose highly refined kinks he can cater to by wearing the right clothes and sporting the right props without needing to fully understand what's behind their desires. At other times he seems to be little more than a harried everyman commuter, like most of us who live in cities nowadays, arriving at multiple locations at different times of day, where at each turn he's expected to play entirely different roles (boss, father, worker, friend, lover) in different tonal registers (tragedy, comedy and everything in between). Who hasn't lived a day that's a less extreme version of the Holy Motors scenario, where each new "appointment" brings unexpected joy, sorrow, laughs, weirdness, absurdity, music, etc. and the only way to make it through is to live in the moment and just go with what comes? In this way, Holy Motors is very much about the way our identity is constructed by the expectations, needs and limitations of the other people and places we encounter in the course of our over-scheduled day to day lives.

I do have some questions for anyone else who's seen it:

What do you make of those early pre-cinema documentary bits of

Spoiler

naked athletes performing physical tasks for Muybridge.

For me it's about something like this: Cinema is first and foremost about watching people do things. That, in spite of a century or more of innovation, all films remain in their essence documentaries of people performing physical actions. And that, in a way, this record of visible actions is still the most precise and definitive thing we can say about the experience of any given film. Not what a film means, or why it's all happening thus, but simply what we've seen the actors do.

Are all of the other participants in each segment "actors" like him or are some of them civilians who may be the subject/target/client?

Spoiler

At one point Levant mentions something about the size of cameras nowadays, almost as if he's aware of being on camera at all times, without necessarily being able to see who's filming him. Like a life entirely subsumed by Big Brother as Reality TV where everyone's existence is his own private Truman Show. Then again, there were moments where the acting jobs seemed to go beyond a performance. Like the harsh scolding of the daughter, which felt more real and personal: "Your punishment is to be you." So did some kind of prior relationship with the Minogue character and Levant's reaction to her demise -- almost as if her death by falling may have been as "real" to her as his previous death by self-inflicted stab wound and yet it was entirely "real" to Levant and, at that moment from his point of view, she was truly dead to him.

Are all of these scenarios being dramatized (solely, partially or ultimately?) for our benefit as audience members? There's an image in the beginning of the film of an audience, in the dark, homogenized by darkness, mesmerized by what's unfolding on an unseen screen. The role of the audience vis-a-vis what's being shown within the world of this film seems both entirely passive and yet wildly exalted -- especially if all of this is really being done just for the benefit of those who sit and watch it happen.

Btw, during the old man

Spoiler

deathbed

segment a woman behind me turned to her husband and said in a whisper: "Do you even know what's going on?" I shushed her but what I would like to have said was: "No. None of us does exactly. And yet here we all sit, most of us rapt, continuing to watch in unfold. Isn't that kind of the point?"

[mfunk9786]

Btw, during the old man

Spoiler

deathbed

segment a woman behind me turned to her husband and said in a whisper: "Do you even know what's going on?" I shushed her but what I would like to have said was: "It's not a journey. Every journey ends, but we go on. The world turns, and we turn with it. Plans disappear, dreams take over. But wherever I go, there you are. My luck. My fate. My fortune. Holy Motors. Inevitable."

Fixed

[zedz]

There's an image in the beginning of the film of an audience, in the dark, homogenized by darkness, mesmerized by what's unfolding on an unseen screen. The role of the audience vis-a-vis what's being shown within the world of this film seems both entirely passive and yet wildly exalted -- especially if all of this is really being done just for the benefit of those who sit and watch it happen.

The film's framing device seems to me to be a very bald statement of intent: the director Leos Carax (the guy in the sequence, whose dream-self / film-self is the anagrammatic Mr Axel Oscar whom we follow through the rest of the film) rises from his bed in a darkened room, finds a forest in his room (shades of 'Where the Wild Things Are') and enters it through a door, which leads him to a dream-cinema (complete with prowling wild animals) where the film 'Holy Motors' unfolds. This is Carax's dream of cinema, and the film follows impeccable dream logic, with its shifting scenarios and identities. This doesn't mean that the film isn't about anything, or that it abandons all narrative rules (rather, it invents its own), but I think it does mean that searching for an underlying 'reality' is a bit of a fool's errand - i.e. this part of the dream is just a dream, but this next part of the dream really happened.

That prologue seems to me Carax's way of stating loud and clear: what you're about to see is a dream, with the unspoken corollary that he's adopted this form because that's the best way he has of expressing the ideas about cinema, identity and so forth that he wishes to explore. After all, what part of everyday life regularly features people and places that can be two contradictory things at once, or can twist into something completely different as if it's the most natural thing in the world? It also accounts for the intensive layers of references to Carax's own films, the actors he's worked with and the films by other directors that he's loved - those are the things that occupy his subconscious and that get dredged up by the dream-producers to fill the empty Paris streets.

[warren oates]

Zedz, I don't know if I'm searching for an underlying reality so much as I'm wondering whether cinema for Carax or this film's notion of cinema for Carax is more about putting his dreams up on a screen (with Levant's help) or putting his dreams up on a screen for consumption by an audience. A distinction that does seem to matter to the film, where I sometimes wonder if there are any "audience" members inside the frame of each scenario, as it seems that not all the of those figures who ought to be "actors" are in on it. I don't think this is a film to be solved. But that doesn't mean it doesn't have its own mysterious internal logic and that these self-imposed rules aren't worth sussing out.

As for people and things that can be two things at once or transform on a dime, well, visually that's dream logic and the plasticity of cinema for sure. But metaphorically/dramatically, yeah it's certainly applicable more broadly to the human condition. I don't know too many people who haven't at one point or another been stunned by a near relation's ambiguous/deceptive/double motives or a loved one's before-their-eyes transmogrifying into some kind of monster.

[colinr0380]

After all, what part of everyday life regularly features people and places that can be two contradictory things at once, or can twist into something completely different as if it's the most natural thing in the world?

Politics! But then that would perhaps be less of a dream film than a nightmare one.

[Black Hat]

What do you make of those early pre-cinema documentary bits of

Spoiler

naked athletes performing physical tasks for Muybridge.

For me it's about something like this: Cinema is first and foremost about watching people do things. That, in spite of a century or more of innovation, all films remain in their essence documentaries of people performing physical actions. And that, in a way, this record of visible actions is still the most precise and definitive thing we can say about the experience of any given film. Not what a film means, or why it's all happening thus, but simply what we've seen the actors do.

Indeed. That and I would imagine the thrill a filmmaker receives from filming remaining unchanged however, I also took the rehashing of 'how it all started' as Carax indicting what it has become. On the other hand it can also be seen as a celebration of what filming has become although my impression is firmly in the camp of the former.

Are all of these scenarios being dramatized (solely, partially or ultimately?) for our benefit as audience members? There's an image in the beginning of the film of an audience, in the dark, homogenized by darkness, mesmerized by what's unfolding on an unseen screen. The role of the audience vis-a-vis what's being shown within the world of this film seems both entirely passive and yet wildly exalted -- especially if all of this is really being done just for the benefit of those who sit and watch it happen.

What you've hit on here is I think the ultimate theme of Holy Motors in that it is a film about cinema and to the extent that it is about acting is in how the actor exists within that sphere of filming. At first I was also confounded by what was real and what wasn't but, looking back now it seems inconsequential to the idea of the film. The idea being communicated at the start with the shot of the audience relating to a film. Carax has made a film about how film can in a multitude of ways enrapture and engross an audience. It is an incredible homage to the power of cinema that succeeds in all the ways that a film like Hugo failed.

[swo17]

I don't know what this says about me, but I didn't actually find this that strange at all. Or perhaps better said, the film flows so naturally from one moment to the next that, if anything, the stranger, more disorienting sequences are the ones that play most like real life. (Certainly, several of the initial reports from Cannes were sensationalized, making the film out to be merely strange for strangeness' sake.) I think mfunk's reading is mostly on the money, though rather than being a cautionary tale against actual immortality (not really a life choice that's up for consideration!) I think this is a symbol for the creative process and for the movie industry in general. There's a telling line in a song playing toward the end of the film, something like "what drudgery to always repeat the thing you love." M. Oscar loves his craft, or at least did at one time (he does state at one point that he finds beauty in the art of it) but it also clearly wears on him. What is it that causes this? The constant pressure to one-up yourself? The weight of so much mediocrity from those who don't try to? The despicable elements of the human condition that one has to take on? The profound connections feigned with other actors but perhaps absent from real life? It's interesting that a film so alive with the possibilities of cinema is also so cynical about the lack of them. Though perhaps that's the point.

Spoiler

Note how the film (more or less) follows up two of its most fantastical sequences with three in a row that involve some form of death for a character with Lavant's visage, as if the film itself is saying "I've shown you my best ideas, now please let me end!"

The most impressive thing about the film to me though is how convincingly it evokes the landscape of a dream. Some of my favorite touches:

Spoiler

- The vague song lyrics sung by Kylie Minogue's character, leaving out all of the important details. I frequently have dreams like this, where I wake up thinking I have come up with some amazing song but then realize there was nothing to it.
- The surreal writhing in the motion capture sequence, so much more fascinating and, yes, cinematic than the CGI sequence it is serving to produce. For whatever reason, this made me think back to the juggling scene in Broadway Melody of 1940. Remember when movies used to wow you with incredible things that people could do, or with tricks that might take hundreds of takes to get right, instead of just wallpapering everything over with CGI?
- The tombstone inscriptions in the M. Merde sequence. That whole sequence really. (Apparently a rough draft of this was included in the omnibus film Tokyo! Has anyone seen this to compare?)

[zedz]

(Apparently a rough draft of this was included in the omnibus film Tokyo! Has anyone seen this to compare?)

It's a completely different film with the same character. M. Merde emerges in Tokyo and goes on a rampage of affront like a pint-sized Godzilla. He's then put on trial for his crimes.

[knives]

I thought Mfunk's avatar looked familiar. I'm now all the more interested as revisiting the same characters in different contexts is always fascinating.

[swo17]

(Apparently a rough draft of this was included in the omnibus film Tokyo! Has anyone seen this to compare?)

It's a completely different film with the same character. M. Merde emerges in Tokyo and goes on a rampage of affront like a pint-sized Godzilla. He's then put on trial for his crimes.

Spoiler

Ah. In any case, this adds humorous context to the moment when he sees that this is his assignment and shudders "Oh no."

[zedz]

I don't remember the exact details, but I recall that there were a number of references back to the previous film that made me grin from ear to ear.

Spoiler

Wasn't there a pair of Japanese tourists who clearly knew exactly what horror had descended upon them?

The film is full of similar enriching references back to other of Carax's earlier films as well.

[Grand Illusion]

Fun movie. I'm not really a fan of "movies about movies," but I enjoyed myself in this one. I think the leprechaun sequence was the best vignette because it managed to be completely bonkers yet retain a strong satirical value. Other sequences, like the musical with actors in a factory full of mannequins, felt more on-the-nose and navel-gazing for my taste. Still, I laughed a lot at the sheer insanity of everything.

[Michael Kerpan]

I really HATED Carax's segment of "Tokyo!". So I suspect I will pass on this. ;~}