Leos Carax
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His driver, Céline (Edith Scob, "Eyes Without a Face"), tells him he has nine appointments this day, many hours of work before she can return to "Holy Motors."
It's no accident that the old chauffeur is played by Edith Scob, the star of Franju's classic "Eyes Without a Face."
Carax is especially fixated on Franju’s greatest work, the nocturnal and terrifying 1959 masterpiece, “Eyes Without a Face,” about an obsessive plastic surgeon trying to rebuild his daughter’s face, which he had disfigured in a car accident, from the combined parts of transplants of beautiful kidnapped young women.
The finale of Holy Motors sees Édith Scob, as the impeccably dressed Céline, donning the mask she wore playing a disfigured girl in George Franju’s 1960 horror classic Eyes Without a Face.
His driver is Céline (Édith Scob — mostly known as the daughter with the disfigured face in Georges Franju's "Eyes Without a Face"), and she has two simple responsibilities: give him the detailed file for his next appointment and make sure he arrives on time for it.
A chameleonic blank page, he's a funnier version of the stiff financier in Cosmopolis, riding about in a limo driven by a trusted chauffeur (Edith Scob, whose performance in Franju's Eyes Without a Face is one of many allusions).
Frances Ha (2013)
Directed by Noah Baumbach
influenced by Mauvais Sang (1986), Boy Meets Girl (1984)
Visuals Characters
When the film overtly cribs from the style and storytelling devices of the French New Wave, it's not out of some bland, "I like the New Wave" impulse, but because that's an extremely useful touchstone for a story about insular young people (it does, however, hurt the film that its best moment is an out-of-nowhere direct copy of a scene from the much better neo-New Wave film Mauvais sang ).
Otherwise, Baumbach’s style could be called homage-happy: It’s classic Truffaut meets vintage Woody Allen meets Girls, with one direct lift—an exhilarating, freewheeling David Bowie-scored street dance—from Leos Carax’s Mauvais Sang.
The film shows many influences, from Woody Allen (white titles on black backgrounds, New York City shot in glorious black and white) to Leos Carax (Gerwig dances through the streets to David Bowie's 'Modern Love,' just like Denis Lavant in "Mauvais Sang").
Frances’s celebratory sprint through Manhattan, her speeding steps giving way gradually to outright pirouettes, is a remake of an identical set piece in Leos Carax’s Mauvais Sang (1986), only with the camera moving in the opposite direction.
One sprint lovingly lifts from Leos Carax’s delirious tracking-shot trot in 1986‘s Mauvais Sang, same-tuned to Bowie’s “Modern Love,” and there’s an obvious and joyful French fixation here, with music cues plucked from The 400 Blows and Contempt, among others (it’s wall-to-wall Georges Delerue, to the happy sigh of Francophiles everywhere), and a matte-gray palette piped in from the French New Wave.
Just like Denis Lavant in Leos Carax's Mauvais Sang.
Beauty and the Beast (1946)
Directed by Jean Cocteau
influenced Holy Motors (2012)
Characters Visuals
And the longest section, with that nasty troglodyte, incorporates both one of Carax' earlier works (the same character showed up in his contribution to the 2008 anthology film "Tokyo!") and a bit of Cocteau's "Beauty and the Beast."
“Holy Motors” looks forward and backward, combining science fiction with an upended, funhouse mirror history riffing on Cocteau, Bunuel, “Beauty and the Beast,” and Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” and “M,” among many influences.
“Holy Motors” looks forward and backward, combining science fiction with an upended, funhouse mirror history riffing on Cocteau, Bunuel, “Beauty and the Beast,” and Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” and “M,” among many influences.
He's formally dressed like a businessman, and one of his daughters calls from the roof: "Travaille bien" ("work hard"), a comic reference to Claire Denis's film Beau travail (aka Nice Work), a reshaping of Melville's Billy Budd set in the French Foreign Legion, in which Lavant played the Claggart figure.
That simian domesticity evokes Oshima Nagisa’s Max Mon Amour (1986), one of a number of references that will make this a cinephile’s wet dream.
Lavant also appears as a sort of milky-eyed Mandarin leprechaun who -- accompanied by Akira Ifukube's theme music from " Godzilla " (1954) -- emerges from a sewer to kidnap a supermodel (Eva Mendes) and to chew flowers stolen from graves marked with headstones that read -- in a brilliant sight gag -- "Visitez Mon Site" (French for "Visit My Website").
And the longest section, with that nasty troglodyte, incorporates both one of Carax' earlier works (the same character showed up in his contribution to the 2008 anthology film "Tokyo!") and a bit of Cocteau's "Beauty and the Beast."
Check out the headstones in Père Lachaise Cemetery, where Merde sprints through on his Beauty and the Beast quest, and you’ll see both direct jokes (“Visitez mon site”) and indirect ones.
Sure, we see the shout out to Beauty and the Beast, but the real world work, especially the scenes where Lavant is dealing with true tragedies, become all the more powerful and engaging.
Carax stuffs his film with innumerable film and literary references — Vidor, Merde’s “Beauty and the Beast” motif, 1960’s “Eyes Without a Face,” nods to Franz Kafka and quietly horrifying Kubrickian darkness — as one would expect from a director who got his start writing for the French film journal Cahiers du Cinema.
But there's dazzlingly bizarre comedy, too, as in a "Beauty and the Beast"-inspired sequence where Oscar absconds with a fashion model (Eva Mendes) and takes her into the catacombs beneath a cemetery.
Furthermore, the symbiotic connection between auteur and collaborator is established in the eerie and beautiful opening, as a man (played by the director) discovers a portal that opens to packed theater playing King Vidor’s “The Crowd,” leading to the introduction of the chameleonic protagonist.
The nearly silent prologue evokes the social unease and transfixed audience of King Vidor’s 1928 rat-race commentary The Crowd.
He is then on the other side, in the aisle of a cinema, where a packed audience is watching King Vidor’s The Crowd.
The frozen crowd is shot from the perspective of the movie screen as the audience watches the final scenes of King Vidor’s 1928 silent film, “The Crowd.”
You’ll hear lots of people comparing “Holy Motors” to David Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive,” and I guess that’s OK as far as it goes.
(The structure could form a twin cinema with Mulholland Dr.'s Club Silencio.)
Swept up in the excitement, some of the first reviewers made it sound like a visionary cross between Metropolis and Mulholland Drive.
Take David Lynch as an example: one moment he’s messing with our heads with spectacular aplomb in Mulholland Drive and the next he’s driving us cookoo with Inland Empire .
You could also draw parallels with films such as Mulholland Drive and The Tree Of Life.
There's a sense of ambivalence about what this means - the cameras have got smaller, Oscar complains at one point, in an intriguing echo of the famous line from Sunset Boulevard when, as Norma Desmond, Gloria Swanson declares: ''I am big, it's the pictures that got small.''
There are still clear references—one shot of Simon walking along a ridged, blue-painted wall recalls the “Modern Love” sequence of Mauvais Sang—but here he starts to come into his own as a filmmaker.
The Vampires or, The Arch Criminals of Paris (1915)
Directed by Louis Feuillade
influenced Holy Motors (2012)
Visuals
Throwing in a family of monkeys, talking limos and a raging erection for good measure, Holy Motors slinks through Paris, its streets, sewers and rooftops, like the mysterious criminals in Louis Feuillade’s wondrous serials from a century ago: Fantomas, Les Vampires and Judex.
A shorthaired mystery woman, she is played by a quietly expressive Kylie Minogue, clearly channeling Jean Seberg’s character from Jon Luc Godard’s Breathless.
Now this man is inside a cinema, and we meet Monsieur Oscar ( Denis Lavant ), who lives in a house that seems designed by the same architect employed in Jacques Tati's " Mon Oncle ."
Nos comparte su gozo por medio de una citación que ya era una citación: Jo corre por las calles de Nueva York como Frances (Greta Gerwig) en Frances Ha (2012) de Noah Baumbach, como Alex (Denis Lavant) lo hizo en el París de Mala sangre (Mauvais sang, 1986).
(Michael Cimino's eternal transgression in having made Heaven's Gate has haunted his career ever since, even though he also made The Deer Hunter.)
“Holy Motors” looks forward and backward, combining science fiction with an upended, funhouse mirror history riffing on Cocteau, Bunuel, “Beauty and the Beast,” and Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” and “M,” among many influences.
Merde’s fellow sewer dwellers walk in formation like the dehumanized workers of Fritz Lang’s 1927 dystopian vision Metropolis.
Swept up in the excitement, some of the first reviewers made it sound like a visionary cross between Metropolis and Mulholland Drive.
Licorice Pizza (2021)
Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
influenced by Mauvais Sang (1986), Holy Motors (2012)
Visuals
I love the long scene where Alana and Gary are running towards each other from opposite ends of the screen and the city--like something out of Leos Carax's Mauvais Sang , for instance, another film that is like this except all the way through, because it somehow resists shitting the bed with a gag that is hateful and sadly unnecessary.
It’s like a madcap mix of Linklater, “Punch-Drunk Love” and Leo’s Carax’s “Holy Motors.”
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017)
Directed by Luc Besson
influenced by Mauvais Sang (1986)
Visuals
He’s a key figure in the so-called Cinéma du look, a term coined by critic Raphaël Bassan in 1989 to describe the spectacular visual stylings of movies like Leos Carax’s Mauvais Sang and Besson’s Subway.