Oh, "Holy" Night

“Holy Motors” very well may be the weirdest film I’ve ever seen. I mean that as both a declaration of probable fact (nothing else comes to mind besides “Mulholland Dr.,” a comparatively straightforward convention moviegoing experience) and also a compliment of the highest order.  Writer/director Leos Carax (“Pola X,” “The Lovers on the Bridge”) has created a wildly imaginative, totally whacko Wonderland in which his protagonist, Monsieur Oscar (Denis Lavant), explores the nature of creation, illusion, identity – and other featherweight themes – with reckless abandon. It's not everybody's cup of tea (Michael walked out), but for film geeks, it's a phantasmagoric fever dream come to life. See it.

From dawn to dusk, we ride along with Monsieur Oscar in his limousine, driven by an elegant, 60-ish chauffeur –  chauffeuse? – Céline (Edith Scob, wonderfully balancing light with Oscar’s darkness) as she shuttles the strange, strange man to and from each of the day’s nine “assignments.” Between each of these Parisian pitstops, we watch Oscar transform himself from his previous self – an impossibly wealthy family man becomes a hunchbacked beggar woman who stands on a city sidewalk with a tin can held out (“All I’ve seen for 20 years are feet and stone.”) – into the radically altered physical persona apparently required by each of these nine tasks. Whoever it is employing these two odd ducks remains a mystery, with sleek dossiers containing the basics of each job, but really – who cares? The title suggests the one in charge might in fact be God, but there’s no way Carax and his splendidly mad puzzler of a movie are going to give anything away without going bat-shit crazy in the meantime.

The reasons behind Monsieur Oscar’s assignments remain equally shadowy. With Céline behind the wheel of a sleek white limo, Oscar’s inexplicably disparate to-do list for the day includes:

• A totally insane motion-capture sequence that requires Oscar to wear a skintight rubber suit dotted with motion sensors, shoot a machine gun at nothing in particular while running on a treadmill, and finally engage in a truly eye-popping display of simulated sex with a fellow rubber-suited, sensor-spotted partner, a towering model-type with whom he quickly becomes entangled in a 69 formation of laser beams, butt licking, and body bending that will blow your mind…until you see the absurdly graphic mo-cap animation, at which point you will begin to understand the kind of wild ride the limo has in store.
• Transforming into a subterranean, plant-chomping troll/leprechaun-like figure who crashes a fashion magazine’s photo shoot, bites a woman’s fingers off, casually kidnaps model Eva Mendes, whisks her away into his sewer cave where he disrobes, revealing a full erection and a shock of red pubic hair, and proceeds to refashion the model’s garment into a shroud that reveals only her eyes (all while “speaking” indecipherable gibberish), finally lying down to rest his head on her lap as she sings him a lullaby, boner be damned.
• Swapping duties as limo passenger to become the disgruntled driver of an old beater car, in which he picks up his teenage daughter from a suburban party, deriding the pitiful wallflower for lying to him about her social bravado at the party and doling out an emphatic punishment – that this young girl simply has to live with herself, her ineptitude.
• Becoming a guido-type assassin who stabs a man in the neck, shaves the victims head and carves scars into his face so the killer and dead man become identical, changing clothes and all before becoming a victim in his own right and turning the whole episode into the movie’s big WTF centerpiece.
• And of course, an encounter with the pop star Kylie Minogue, who plays a similarly enigmatic, limo-transported impersonation professional with whom Monsieur Oscar shares an apparently emotional history. As the pair walks and waxes nostalgic through the dilapidated interior of an old department store, Kylie casually segues into an obligatory musical number, singing a gorgeously mournful song whose choral melody serves as the movie’s only real score throughout. “Who were we when we were who we were back then?” she inquires, an existential elegy of Russian Doll regret that gives the frequently absurd goings-on an unexpectedly emotional thrust as Oscar’s workday winds to an end.

What's up with all this weird shit? Is it part of the movie the audience is watching or are we meant to interpret any of this literally, or all of it, or are we being mocked? Who knows, and who cares? By the time we are treated to the rhapsodic “INTERLUDE,” a three-minute wonder (embedded below for your entertainment) in which Lavant inexplicably leads a merry band of mostly accordion players on a delightfully jaunty musical march through arbitrary surroundings before getting back to business with the movie as if nothing happened at all, one thing is certain: What matters in “Holy Motors” is the exhilarating visual voyage Carax has dreamed into being, an emotionally, intellectually and creatively stimulating cinematic experience that is completely unlike anything you’ve ever seen before. 

It’s frequently hilarious, yet subtly heartbreaking in equal measure. As Monsieur Oscar, and his nine alter-egos, Lavant transforms himself before our eyes – makeup and prosthetics are applied between jobs in the back of his impossibly cavernous limo, with costume changes and prop arrangements made as Oscar (smoking and drinking increasingly as the day goes on) and Céline chat obliquely about their crazy job, waxing philosophical/nostalgic about the good old days when their day’s work included trips outside of Paris’s sparkling sprawl. “I miss forests,” says Oscar ruefully.

Like the film he carries effortlessly on bony, spastic shoulders, Lavant’s screen creation is a marvelous spectacle of performance art. The veteran French actor has starred in all six of Carax’s features, dating all the way back to 1980. In "Holy Motors," Lavant transcends form (physical and artistic) to the great benefit of a defiantly abstract function, revealed in episodic euphoria over the course of the film’s audacious nine-act narrative without conventional clarity.  Transforming into 11 characters in total, Lavant’s performance is certainly one of the year’s best, a master class in acting, playing a character who becomes nearly a dozen different people before our eyes – man and woman, old and young, barbaric and genteel – while somehow maintaining credibility as the "original" Oscar becomes increasingly affected by each persona he sheds, fading into nihilistic night as the day winds down.

Any attempt to parse a formal thematic interpretation of “Holy Motors” is likely to result in a baffling merry-go-round of unanswered questions and irrelevant stabs in the dark as to what’s real in the film and what’s not.  It’s clear from the start that “Holy Motors” is taking the audience down a rabbit hole of hallucinatory exhilaration, almost literally, via fantastical key & it’s whimsical lock, hidden in plain sight among the wallpaper trees of a hotel room’s interior.  From there, Carax crosses the threshold of reality – again, almost literally, appearing physically on screen – never to be seen again on screen, replaced perhaps by the protagonist in the film’s dreamy/hideous alternate dimension, fundamentally establishing the proceedings as definitively surreal and sticking to it like you wouldn’t believe. 

But I’ve gotten ahead of myself. First, “Holy Motors” opens on a darkened theater, its faceless audience watching a movie in rapt silence, and the title card suddenly overtakes them in bold, green capital letters. It’s a deliberately spellbinding image of a deliberately spellbound crowd, non-descript strangers gathered together for a collective cinematic experience.  We’re them. Then, up on the balcony, an anonymous, pajama-clad fellow appears (it’s Carax himself, speaking no lines), gazing down on the crowd of seated spectators as the camera follows suit.

In the periphery – what the…? Is that a naked baby toddling down the aisle? Before your eyes have a chance to confirm a thing, the camera cuts to the aisle below, looking up toward the theater’s entrance this time, as a black mastiff stalks out of the shadows and into the dim red light of a movie theater, portending with ominous elegance the unfathomable surprises that set “Holy Motors” apart from every other film, ever. It’s a singular sensation.