"Holy Motors" Blasts into The 50th NY Film Fest

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Parent Category: Film Festivals

Category: Reviews

Published on Wednesday, 10 October 2012 03:45

Written by Laura Blum

Early word on Holy Motors was that it's seriously loopy. But little could prepare New York Film Festival-goers for this latest hallucination from director  Leox Carax. It's a doozy. More than a decade has elapsed since the French auteurist last regaled -- or bedeviled -- us with a feature film.

And now the creator of such titles as Pola X, The Lovers on the Bridge and Bad Blood has come back with a science fiction so rangy and lycergic, it curdles into a mash of surrealism and Comic Con.

Carax alter ego Denis Lavant is Monsieur Oscar, who first appears as a senior banker embarking on a packed day of meetings in his white limo. Chauffeured by his assistant Céline (Edith Scob from Georges Franju's meditation on altered guises Eyes Without a Face), Oscar should win an Oscar for the myriad roles he will enact over the ensuing shift. (No surprise that Oscar is Carax's middle name, which together with his first name Alex yields the anagram "Leos Carax.")

For each rendezvous, on comes the wig, the maquillage, the get-out and the body language to effect a complete transformation. Now he's an old beggar hag out of a Grimms fairy tale; now, the randy beast to Eva Mendes's top-model beauty (resurrecting Carax's "Merde" vignette for the 2008 film Tokyo!); and now, a father chastising his daughter for her clumsy social skills.

Blood will gush when Oscar plays an assassin dispatching his döppelganger -- and several times more till Kylie Minogue jumps to her doom from an abandoned luxury hotel in a scene that trades richly on Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady.

Dread is rarely far from the edges of Oscar's fever dream, and yet a motion-capturesequence starring red-clad contortionist Reda Oumouzoune must go down in cinema history as a climax of erotic inspiration. That is, until the dancing deities Frankenstein into CGI cyphers out of a superhero game franchise.

Shifting the revelry from the eyes to the ears, a sequence with a roving accordion band puts the filmed poetry to music. How smoothly the nonsensical goes down when unequivocally pleasing to the senses.

Not since sexscapade Eating Raul has a protagonist performed so many fantasies. But the question is, Whose? Carax likes to keep us guessing. Lacking a clear master or motive, shape shifter Oscar embraces each faux experience with the commitment that Gregor Samsa might have shown as a gigantic insect.

"Holy Mot..s" -- holy "words" -- is all that's left of a decrepit "Holy Motors" store sign towards the end, but whether Carax is tossing a waive to les belle lettres or signalling entropy is an invitation to continue head-scratching.

It's deeper down the rabbit hole as a warehouse of talking limos animate the final frames. Their chorus of gripes swell the mix, rueing the march of dubious progress that threatens to turn such old world chariots of real action into their own hearsts.

Having taxied us across the chief rites of human life, Carax/Oscar revs our nostalgia for a time when not all of experience was powered by the unholy motors of virtual technology. 

Holy Moly.