In what is arguably the most astonishing, audacious and auspicious movie this year, Leos Carax’s HOLY MOTORS (MA) serves up a surreal slice of cinema that the likes of David Lynch would sacrifice their first born for.
It begins with a pajama clad man waking up and finding a door in the room in which he has been sleeping opens into a cinema where an audience is collectively dreaming the scene on the screen. In cinematic sleight of hand we, the audience, become that audience.
The fundamental identity of existing, dreaming and acting inspires this puzzling, perplexing yet playfully profound picture.
At first, we are introduced to lead actor Denis Lavant as a seemingly well-heeled business man fareweling his family before embarking on a day’s work in his chauffer driven stretch limousine.
Turns out the car, driven by a formidable female, played by the super sexy septuagenarian Edith Scob, is the man’s office and his line of work is being a chameleon. Throughout the film he is a banker, beggar woman, motion capture specialist, Monsieur Merde ( a grotesque who disrupts a fashion shoot and kidnaps the beautiful model) ,an accordionist, an assassin, The victim, and a decrepit.
He is real, but simultaneously an illusion, an actor strutting himself upon a stage that is no less the streets of Paris!
Mystery, intrigue, imagery, dance, music, sex, love and death infuse this monumental mind-field that dares to be bombastic whilst strangely reverent.
HOLY MOTORS is a film that references films and film makers- Kubrick, Franju, Fellini, Lon Chaney, Charlie Chaplin and Charlie Kaufman to name a few. The use of mask and costume is highly theatrical but the framing is supremely cinematic.
Apart from Denis Lavant and Edith Scob, pic is adorned with cameos from Kylie Minogue, Michel Piccoli and Eva Mendes and the director himself.
HOLY MOTORS is wholly engrossing, compulsively puzzling, and awesomely audacious. I can’t wait to see it again!
© Richard Cotter
25th August, 2012
Tags: Sydney Movie Reviews- HOLY MOTORS, Leos Carax, Deni Lavant, Edith Scob, Kylie Minogue, Michael Piccoli, Eva Mendes.