What the hell did I just watch? This was my first reaction to Leos Carax’s Holy Motors, a movie that is not so much a movie as it is a collection of ideas, visuals and themes all in an effort to present a commentary on the current state of filmmaking… I think.
In all honesty, I can’t commit to any one interpretation of this film and in no way believe I can speak as an authority in any way. The film opens with a man (Carax) who wakes, trapped in a room with no door. Wallpaper depicting a black and white forest surrounds him. He pounds on the wall, listening for a hollow opening that might present a way out. Suddenly the middle finger on his right hand is a key of sorts, he pushes it into the only hole the wall has, it turns, it unlocks and he breaks through the paper.
On the other side he stands on the balcony of a movie theater. Below him the lifeless faces of the audience stare blankly at the screen as an unseen movie plays on. End scene.
The scene I just described is, essentially, the overture for what is to come. It has to do with the film in the sense we are about to watch something that has to do with cinema. You could interpret the audience as dead. You could interpret what they’re watching is empty and lifeless. What follows is a series of nine vignettes in which Monsieur Oscar (Denis Lavant) plays a variety of “parts” as he’s driven all around Paris by his limo driver Celine (Edith Scob).
Each vignette is connected only by Oscar’s involvement and as individual pieces of cinema, what you take out of them is up to you. Personally, I took away very little. The audience I saw it with laughed repeatedly and cheered loudly by the film’s end. Why? I’m not entirely sure.
First Oscar is picked up, playing a banker as he heads off to start the day. Next he dresses as a beggar woman, is dropped off on the side of the street, walks a ways and begins asking for change. Then he’s dressed in a motion capture suit, takes to the green screen stage where he tumbles around in a variety of martial arts moves before he’s joined by a female artist and the two take part in an alien coital ritual initially represented in a Kamasutra of twists and impossible turns. The scene is later rendered in a masturbatory CG representation of the act. I interpreted this as a big middle finger to the decline in cinema and its reliance on computers. Curiously enough, this isn’t even close to being the weirdest thing inside the film.
The oddest, most baffling moment comes when Oscar transforms himself into a sewer dweller referred to as Monsieur Merde, which translates to Mr. Shit. Looking like a demented leprechaun in a green suit with a tangled mess of red hair, beard, gnarled and yellow finger and toe nails and a blind right eye he climbs out of the sewer into the Cemetery du Pere-Lachaise where all the tombstones read “Visit My Website” followed by a URL address. Merde begins eating the flowers left by visiting mourners and trampling anyone in sight before coming across a photo shoot where he abducts a dead-eyed model (Eva Mendes) and takes her beneath the city.
In a strange variation of the “Beauty and the Beast” scenario he licks her naked armpit, removes a portion of her dress and converts it into a burqa before removing all of his clothes, lays down in her lap with a massive erection and begins sprinkling dried flowers on himself. What the hell does this mean?
The only interpretation of the scene I could think of was that Carax, first with the website addresses on the tombstones is saying something along the lines of, “Even in death we don’t stop marketing ourselves.” And it, again, creates a commentary on our dedication to computers. And then with the final image, of the naked beast in the lap of the unseen beauty, I could only think of the 2012 World Press Photo of the Year (see it here) in which a fragile man is held close by a burqa-clad woman. Problem is, that photo was taken in October 2011 and I’m pretty sure this film was shot before then and I don’t necessarily think there is any political motivation to this film.
So what is it? I don’t know. Monsieur Merde was first seen in his segment of 2008’s Tokyo!. In the press notes Carax says the film came out of his “incapacity to carry out several projects” and this is the result. The commentary on cinema is taken to such an extreme that he shot on digital which he admits to hating saying, “[Digital cameras] are imposing themselves or being imposed on us.”
Beyond what I’ve mentioned here and Oscar’s seeming lack of devotion to his craft as the film carries on, I’m sure someone could sit down and write an entire thesis on what Carax is trying to say and why it works so well. I’m just not that person.
Admittedly, over the course of the film’s 115 minutes it was largely able to maintain my attention. It was my third film of the day and it played at 7:30 PM, a time where even the most lively of critics here at the Cannes Film Festival can give way to sleep. The man next to me slept for approximately 60% of the film and considering the strangeness of it all I don’t believe I saw a single walk-out.
It’s a mystery to me what people were able to take away from this film. Then again, speaking with one man outside the theater afterwards, he couldn’t put into words what he liked so much. I’ve done my best to describe what I saw, and maybe you’ll be intrigued. It’s admittedly different, but I had a hard time finding much of a concrete message within it all as much as a saw a director experimenting to various degrees of success and presenting a film that isn’t really a film at all.
