Friday 28 September 2012

"Holy Motors" (Moviemail 28/09/12)


Holy Motors is perhaps the biggest wild card the movies will have to play in 2012, which – at a time of corporate safe bets – is almost a recommendation in itself. Yet it may be better to let cinéma du look alumnus Leos Carax’s return to our screens ambush you, as it did the critics in Cannes this summer, than have anybody attempt to analyse or synopsise it beforehand – because this is patently a film beyond analysis and synopses, in ways both good and bad. If you ran across it at a party, you’d walk away regarding it as a bit of a character. More precisely, it’s bits of several characters, and that’s really about it.

After waving au revoir to his family one morning, Denis Lavant’s Monsieur Oscar repairs to a limousine, where his chauffeur (Edith Scob) informs him he has nine “appointments” for the day. The limo proves to be a roving prop box, in which Lavant/Oscar will make himself up to play nine roles: among them, a Russian peasant woman, a motion capture artist, a green-suited goblin (the Monsieur Merde character road-tested in Carax’s third of the portmanteau film Tokyo!), and both a bullet-headed gangster and his doppelganger victim, which presumably counts as a double shift. Quite why he’s shifting shapes goes unexplained: as night falls, the limos we’ve seen circling the city’s streets are returned to the garage of the title and left, like the audience, to talk among themselves.

That essential emptiness – where narrative development or thematic substance would conventionally go – has left some early reviewers to fill Holy Motors with grand claims. Is it really a mobile history of the cinema, stopping off at Muybridge, Cocteau and Godard en route? Maybe. It’s unquestionably a strong vehicle for its leading man, shuttling between identities like a subtitled Mr. Benn. (Another cartoonish touch: characters die, only to pick themselves off the floor and get on to the next gig.) Taking a childish delight in dressing up and messing around, this is no Serious Art Film; any profundity here has been assigned to it, rather than driven at.

The Merde episode best displays the film’s strengths and limitations: it has funny ideas to run with, like the graveyard full of tombstones promoting websites, but gets into trouble when it starts equating men who prefer their women in burqas to dirty, gibbering cavedwellers. After this sudden burst of rude energy – in which Eva Mendes is as much of a stooge as the passers-by in Dom Joly skits – Holy Motors begins to run out of gas: the accordion interlude is stirring, but otherwise we’re stuck with rather more prosaic transformations (a stressed father, a dying old man), and Kylie in Jean Seberg clothing singing an unusually forgettable Neil Hannon song.

Less visually striking than Carax’s cinéma du look output, its tactics remain broadly the same: to divert and seduce the eye with novelties, without having much to say once the eye has alighted upon them. It’s enjoyably eccentric, often amusing, even reassuring, in providing ample proof the cinema can still, even now, throw up this kind of curveball. Yet Carax is only ever working on the same level as the fashion photographer the Merde segment seeks to satirise, gushing “Beauty! Beauty! Beauty!”, then “Weird! So weird! Weird!” Holy Motors has a little of both, granted, but possibly not as much as those who first saw it saw in it.

Holy Motors opens in selected cinemas from today.

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