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
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?
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
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?"
