rochefort [Celluloid 09.23.12] musical comedy arthouse avant-garde



Mr. Oscar (Denis Lavant), leaves his home one morning, dressed in an expensive suit and surrounded by bodyguards, his limo driver waiting to take him to the first of the day's nine "appointments". And... if you want to remain unspoiled for one of the most rewarding film experiences you'll have all year, you should probably stop right there. But hey, I'm here to write a review, so read on if you like.

All-rightey. If you're still with me, "Holy Motors" is the latest from Leos Carax, who did the segment "Merde" in the anthology "TOKYO!", and re-teams him with Denis Lavant, a thirty-year veteran of French cinema and television and one of the country's most daring and expressive actors. If you don't know Lavant from the likes of "Beau Travail" or "Tuvalu", you may recognize him as the vagrant in the video for "Rabbit in Your Headlights" who stops a car with nothing but his outstretched body. In "Motors", Lavant's Mr. Oscar is a businessman who spends every day jutting from one appointment to another. Only Mr. Oscar is a not your typical businessman, and the appointments aren't very typical, either. His first is to change into a cripple's dirty rags and beg for change on the sidewalk. His second is to enter a visual fx studio, don a mo-cap suit and model for cgi sex between two monsters. He's only getting started, and so is the movie.



It's not so much that "Holy Motors" is difficult to categorize, it's just that to do so requires a whole lotta hyphens and slashes. It's a comedy/art film/musical, etc. With every new appointment, Oscar adopts a new identity and the film fully switches gears, changing tone and genre abruptly, casually, and often quite whimsically. He is alternately a bum, a loving father, an assassin, and a tragic lover. And just as soon as one starts getting all worked up about the meaning of it all, the next segment does a twitch and a jerk and basically thumbs its nose at the need for all this talk of structure and narrative. Interestingly enough, though, the movie's loaded with story, so much that it's not remotely an exaggeration to say that it could spawn a dozen features. We get the first act of some, the climax of others, and on it goes. It's no small feat, this. Even if you find you don't completely care for some of the segments, you'll most likely wish you could see much longer versions of the rest.

Since I don't want to just be vague about my impressions of the film, I'll say that I agree with a lot of other reviewers' observations that "Motors" concerns itself with issues of identity, the social masks we all wear, and the blurred line between reality and fantasy. But something else hit me soon into the pic, and stuck with me throughout: "Holy Motors" is the cinematic equivalent of a great rock and roll album. Not a strict concept album, either, just one good track after another by an artist at the top of his or her form. It's designed so that subsequent viewings need not be from beginning to end; one can just pick favorites and loop them, knowing that when the mood hits, the original linear experience could be all the sweeter.

So yeah, it rocks.

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JeffC (4 months ago) Reply

I may have to give this another try as try as I might I just could not get into it. In the beginning I was like WTF? But then once I grasped what was going on it still just didn't keep me enthralled. And the very end? I don't know, I think this is getting way overhyped for what it was.