Critics reviews

Formally, the film is an excuse for Carax to try as many styles as he can—slapstick comedy, rock musical, monster movie—and reference a century’s worth of cinephilia. And Lavant is the vehicle for his director’s versatility, trying on a variety of (dis)guises . . . and proving himself in the process to be one of the wildest and most inventive physical comedians of all time.

In Holy Motors, Lavant, who was 23 at the time of Boy Meets Girl, is the mirror image of the filmmaker's own youth, turned into a spectacle and an object of (cinematic) desire – so cinephilic references are part of the game: we are the sum of the films we have beloved.

To say that HOLY MOTORS is Leos Carax's valentine to film and filmmaking would be appropriate both for the recent holiday and the film that is itself rife with overused clichés. That word is surprisingly apt for Carax's film, though only in the most literal sense: he addresses the overwrought concepts of filmgoing and filmmaking, but in a uniquely lyrical way that is respective to the madhouse stylings of the wunderkind-film-critic-turned-filmmaker.

As the subtitled lines flashed up and M. Oscar entered his apartment, I thought to myself, Yes! This is it! This is what Carax is saying! We are, all of us performers! This is a profound meditation on the roleplay that is life and the role cinema plays in life! Then it turned out the family he was returning to was a bunch of monkeys. Well played, Carax, well played.

Aside from the fact that I vehemently disagree with the notion that "on demand" content is conning us, Carax's crankiness is such that he allows his desultory stream of a film to both fail (narratively speaking) and depress (humanly speaking—Mr. Oscar is exhausted) seemingly so it can play as proof of the chosen style's shortcomings.

In cinema, a narrative premise is usually something that you like (or not) for its ability to get everything else in a film moving... But it is not the film. In Holy Motors, by contrast, the premise, all by itself, provides endless fuel for wondering and speculating and figuring. Carax may well have arrived at it through a David Lynch-style (day)dreaming or free association; however it came about, it ended up gaining an hallucinatory hyper-logic that is unique in cinema.

For the first time in Carax's cinema, Lavant is named not Alex but Oscar (the director's birth name is Alexandre Oscar Dupont), and the director who already mixed up the letters of his old name now renews himself with a second name, and this old anatomical extension of the ‘new wave', this old ghost... open-mouthed, a brave, resounding, ironic laugh which gathers all the lived stories, and the stories that could not be lived, the stories that were told, and those that remain to be told...

These are works that demand, even more fervently, that we gain entry to them from a small, intimate corner. And, if we can find that spot – that opening – then probably everything that the film _is_, or _can be_, will vanish before the experience, unique and secret, that this work gives us, and that we can give to it. All this explains why, in a film like Holy Motors – which is so full of sublime moments – it is the opening sequence that obsesses me the most.

Holy Motors derives much of its power from the way that its overture and finale are placed as its grand bookends. Each act in between is its own beautiful piece – self-contained, almost solipsistic – but works best when slotted into place. As it opens, Carax himself wakes from slumber and an oceanic expanse of sound surrounds him, a soundscape reminiscent of Paris and its busy metropolitan streets, but with calming seagulls and lapping water redolent of the seaside.

Is Holy Motors really considered ‘difficult'? For anyone who has a sense of our culture, wherein each individual self has, at every moment, to be laid out on a platter ready for imminent media-consumption, there are so many emotional and intellectual entry points into the film.

Holy Motors is a film about movement, a fact consecrated in its very title. But what haunts me today in this film is stillness – in fact, one unnaturally frozen moment. When the sleeping man, played by Carax, wakes and finds a secret door in the wall, the door opens out on to a movie theatre. In one shot, we become the screen, and we look out into the audience. Mobile pools of light reflect from the screen on to the crowd, but the audience itself is utterly immobile, completely frozen.

Quite clearly, Carax, after thirteen years of wandering in the wasteland of unfinished projects and missed opportunities, took Luis Buñuel's advice: he closed his eyes and dreamt this very daring manifesto of a cinema hovering beyond the liminal horizons of multiplex orthodoxies.