Holy Motors (2012)
Directed by Leos Carax
We follow 24 hours in the life of a being moving from life to life like a cold and solitary assassin moving from hit to hit. In each of these interwoven lives, the being possesses an entirely distinct identity: sometimes a man, sometimes a woman, sometimes youthful, sometimes old. By turns murderer, beggar, company chairman, monstrous creature, worker, family man.
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39 films that influenced Holy Motors
What critics say influenced Holy Motors
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).
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.
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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.”
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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.''