Holy Leos Carax

review

MOTORS

Words and DesignAvalon Lyndon

In a dripping, underground lair, a bedraggled Denis Lavant – wild, naked, all grubby nails and scraggly red hair – scrambles up to his kidnap victim, knock-out model Kay M (Eva Mendes). He settles down next to her, taking a few choice nibbles out of her hair. Unperturbed, she holds him, passive as a waxwork, comforting this strange little man as if he’s nothing more than a grisly toddler. It’s a completely baffling but strangely magnetic scene, located somewhere between beauty and repulsion, perfection and the grotesque. This is the space Leos Carax’s Holy Motors inhabits. Holy Motors. Let’s boil it down to its constituent parts. We have a man, Monsieur Oscar (Lavant), a glamorous driver (Edith Scob) and a swanky limousine. We have a fully-booked schedule for the day ahead, packed to the brim with rendezvous aplenty. And riding beside us in Monsieur Oscar’s limo we have the kind of costume department the National would be proud of. These are the pieces of the puzzle, but how do they fit together? Our Monsieur Oscar is a bit of a Jack of all trades. Working his way around Paris, he assumes a litany of different guises. He’s the velvet-suited Paris sewer scuttler, the café terrace assassin, the motion capture dummy,

‘somewhere between beauty and repulsion,

perfection and the grotesque’

‘somewhere between beauty and repulsion,

perfection and the grotesque’

the jam-session accordionist, the old flame of a certain Minogue… and seemingly everything in between. He loves, cries, starves, struggles, laughs, fights, flounders… all before his lunch hour. So what’s it all about, Leos? The film does lend itself to pontification. Is it about the deconstruction of the self in an increasingly fractured and virtualised world? Hmm. Maybe. Is it a tongue-in-cheek meta-meditation on the acting profession, the pressure to entertain and the willing suspension of disbelief? Perhaps. But, more importantly… does it really matter? Holy Motors is what it is –

a ramble through the mind of a man with a million ideas and the freedom to make them a reality. When asked by journalists to explain the meaning of that scene between Lavant and Mendes, Leos Carax simply replied, “How would I know?” Structured in a series of episodes with little glue to hold them all together, Holy Motors is not an easy watch. Neither is it a particularly rewarding one in terms of character development or plot progression. But there’s something about it that draws you in, that makes you eager to find out where Carax will take you next. Hopping over genre conventions,

‘the mind of a man with a million ideas

and the freedom to make them a reality’

‘the mind of a man with a million ideas

and the freedom to make them a reality’

we flit from family drama to crime thriller to CGI fantasy to erotic fiction. It makes almost no sense. And it’s absolutely bloody fantastic. Yes, it’s nonsensical. And yes, it’s self-indulgent. But somehow, it’s genius. Much of the kudos should go to the phenomenal performance from long-time collaborator Denis Lavant. Carax has said of Lavant in the past: “When I film this body on the move, I feel the same pleasure I imagine Muybridge felt watching his galloping horse.” This isn’t just a session in latex prosthetics and a change of clothes; with every new

character he takes on, Lavant inhabits an entirely new, chameleonic body. You’ll know very early on whether Holy Motors is your cup of tea. It’s relentlessly and unapologetically preposterous; it’s brash and bizarre. Holy Motors’ is a hallucinatory world of complex and unconnected threads where nothing and no-one is really as they seem – where actions have no consequences and every experience is transitory. Oh, and there are monkeys. So don’t spend the entire film trying to get your head around what’s happening. Don’t try to get it, just abandon logic and roll with those motors.