Holy
Motors
Watching
"Holy Motors" is to cheer (or jeer) that the cinema of Dada circa
1920 thru 2012 is alive again. Duchamp, Man Ray, or Rene Clair had never seen
such things, or maybe they did.
This
is Leos Carax's fourth main feature (The Lovers on The Bridge) who is fond of
eccentric plots with imagery that recalls the psychedelic director Alejandro
Jodorowski (El Topo). "Holy Motors" has a sweep and a slickness to
it. With its detached urban flavor, it recalls Cronenberg's
"Cosmopolis," if Eric Packer's
limo had been waxed with hallucinogens.
At
the start of "Holy Motors, we have Oscar (Denis Lavant) who is sleeping, I
assume, in a dingy motel with a dog. After several minutes, the forest-patterned
wallpaper dissolves to reveal Oscar with a screwdriver for a finger entering a
crowded cinema. There is a baby, followed by a scary growling dog.
Instantly
we are in Paris, with Oscar in a stretched white limo. He is on the phone with
a file in front of him. Quickly the limo turns into a makeup room and Oscar
sets to work, applying makeup and masks. He dons a black skin suit and enters a
warehouse which is equipped with lasers. He has an Uzi type gun. Is Oscar a
video game actor or an assassin?
What
follows is one of the more poetic passages of the film, with Oscar writhing in
video ecstasy as he turns into a reptilian sex creature who becomes fused to a
red-leathered female counterpart. Another file is placed in Oscar's seat and he
turns into a gluttonous and violent, grimy leprechaun. He strips naked and
gorily upsets a photo shoot with the beautiful Eva Mendes. Oscar savagely
gobbles flowers and bites a secretary's
finger clean off. He ransacks a cemetery. In one fine touch, the gravestones
read "Visit My Website".
The
imagery is stirring and although I'm not quite sure what the point is, it's
never boring. In tone and spirit much of the sequences echo the art films of Matthew Barney.
Oscar
drives on, barely communicating to the chauffeur, the Hitchcockian blonde
Celine. (Edith Schob) and getting increasingly ill, the more he impersonates
others. With every new character, Oscar takes nothing with him. Like the
wallpaper in the cinema, he is flat. For the moment, people know him, but then
he vanishes becoming little more than tinsel in a Parisian sky.
There
are many vivid touches in keeping with its iconoclastic tone, not least of
which is a jubilant accordion disco number which runs throughout a gothic
cathedral.
At
one point, we think that Oscar is returning home to his wife in a futurist
apartment ala "2001". Our man Oscar is apparently married to a
chimpanzee and they have two chimp offspring. Juxtaposed against a modernist
and spacey environment, this is both haunting and silly, as is the last scene with the limos actually talking to each other which feels as
goofy as Disney.
What
does it mean? Perhaps it doesn't matter. It is
enough to go ahead and enjoy or just absorb "Holy Motors" for
its mania. I don't think the ghost of Antonin Artaud will utter a peep.
Write Ian at redtv_2005@yahoo.com
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