Holy Motors

“Who were we, when we were who we were back then? Who would we have become if we’d done differently…?”

– Kylie Minogue in Holy Motors

Nothing ever feels quite real in Holy Motors (Leos Carax, 2012), even when the film lays before us the rawest displays of human emotion. Credited as “The Sleeper”, director Leos Carax appears in the opening scene, gently pushes a key that protrudes from his middle finger into the wall, opening a hidden door into a cinema. We peer into the hazy, dark room, but all the patrons are soundly asleep in their seats. Their minds do not awaken to the art before them, and so it is lost. Meanwhile, a grim procession of large, black hounds filters softly down the aisle. Later, we will see death, heartbreak, acts of passion and violence, but this dreamlike spell cast in the opening chapter will never quite be broken.

At first glance, it might appear that Holy Motors is absent of any true narrative, that it drifts meanderingly with the ghostly white stretch limousine as it slips through the dark streets of Paris. In fact, the film has a fairly typical structure: a heady introduction, a tragic climax and a mournful end, which are postmarked by that same omnipresent limousine. The film follows Oscar (played by Denis Lavant, who stars in all but two of Carax’s films), a withered yet vibrant, powerful yet wiry man, who seems to work as a kind of actor. He is given assignments to play characters in a variety of settings, genres and moods. One moment, he is a filthy tramp in a bottle green suit who steals away a beautiful model to play catwalk in the sewer; the next he is a disappointed father trying to build trust with his distant, untruthful daughter in the car ride home from a party. No matter the role, the performance feels genuine, believable, and inhabited. We are not passively witnessing an actor playing theatre, but are swept up by a performer who, for a brief moment, fully inhabits his temporary persona. Our heart breaks with him, we anger with him, we grieve for him. And then the limousine drifts back into view and the spell is broken.

During these performances, different genres blend and intersect. A noirish gangster flick ends in a double-murder; a CGI adult film is created with actors in sensual motion capture suits. Some performances seem to have no particular rhyme or reason, yet each is intense, requiring a reset in the back of the limousine. Oscar’s ever-present chauffeur, Céline (Édith Scob), seems to guard him from his own distractions, keeping him on time as they leap from one strange appointment to the next, gently correcting his misdemeanours and keeping him well-fed. Through the disorientation of each act, she is a creamy-white vision of the calm in the storm, a servient guardian angel. Her presence is warm, even though she rarely allows any outright affection between them. 

The work of the actor is the focal point in this film: their space and honing of their craft. What was once a nearly empty vehicle slowly becomes strewn with all kinds of litter: piles of paperwork, suitcases, clothes, makeup, props – the tools of the trade. Oscar carefully applies, and later removes, layers of intricate makeup. His transformation is total – his skin, hair, eyes, clothes, body, posture, and voice all change for each role. He gives himself wrinkles, scars, eyebrows, thinning hair, nails, a bruise, some dirt, all with such attention to detail. To see him painting his own face and skin is akin to watching a caterpillar enter its cocoon. We are transfixed: Who will he become next?, we wonder fervently. 

Every shot in the film is glorious, grotesque, opulent and dirty; full of colour and energy. This Neo-Baroque aesthetic, identified by scholars such as Angela Ndalianis, emphasises the “refusal to respect the limits of the frame that contains the illusion.”¹ In Holy Motors, this illusion is aggressive. It demands our attention with its strangeness and lust, and threatens to bleed out of the film. Within the frame we are shown a dream of life in which there is pain, fear, and disillusionment, all of which threaten to wake us from the dream. This kind of spectacle-driven cinema uses opulence to highlight the social instability of the world itself, and our fragility of existence. 

Throughout this hallucinatory dream, there are two moments where it is unclear if we, the dreamer, have awoken or simply dreamed too deeply and broken the physics of Carax’s world. The first of these moments is the murder of the banker: Oscar halts the car suddenly, runs into the street wearing a red balaclava and shoots a man point blank. Except this man is also Oscar, one of his personas, the same banker from the film’s first performance. Céline apologises to the gathered crowd, stating that it was a mix-up, yet Oscar felt compelled to kill his previous self. The clue that this too is but an act lies in the ease with which our murderer is simply shuffled into the car again with little resistance or later consequence. This is our first appointment-less performance.

The second performance that feels more like actuality occurs when Oscar catches a glimpse of another performer in an identical stretch limousine: Jean (Kylie Minogue), his former lover. They are both dressed in the costume of another role – Oscar a silver haired romantic, and Jean wearing the styling and hair of Jean Seberg in À bout de souffle (Breathless, Jean-Luc Godard, 1960) – yet they address each other as more than personas. As they walk through a crumbling old building, Jean begins to sing about love, loss and ageing in a beautiful original melody, “Who Were We” (written by Carax and Neil Hannon for the film). Oscar then leaves Jean at the building’s windy summit, only to find her and her new lover dead from the jump at the bottom. His grief is halted, seemingly real, but he is whisked away into the car again. Even though this scene is presented as something other than an appointment and the two are not playing the characters they are costumed as, traces of lingering irreality still pepper this scene. It is theatrical, but feels deeper than performance – love and death threaten the spell of the dream for just a moment.

These moments are paradoxical: their vivid, compulsive emotionality punctuates the dream, only for the theatricality of opulence to bleed back in and return us into surrealism. For a moment it seems like true feelings – of deepest love and deepest hate – can break through the inescapability of the ceaseless checklist of appointments. Céline emphasises time and professionalism to Oscar, and he largely keeps to this invisible, illogical demand even when it seems he would be happier ignoring the obligatory call of the limousine and disappearing into the performance forever. Midway through the film, the sanctuary of the limousine is interrupted by a hunched intruder, peeking between piles of miscellania. This character, credited as “The Man with the Birthmark” (Michel Piccoli, though the role was originally intended for Carax himself), asks Oscar if his heart is truly still in the performances he gives. Oscar tells him he does it for “the beauty of the act”, but the Man replies that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”. If Oscar is the artist, then the Man is the business, seeking only profit from the exploitation of the artist’s body and mind. And yet the artist continues, since there is nothing else that will quench his thirst for self expression. For Marx, the commodification of art under capitalism renders it a product, rather than an expression of personal vision: “A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality.”²  Oscar’s loneliness is emphasised by the fact that his only constant companion, Céline, seems to only partially support his artistic sovereignty. Oscar is devoted to art because it is his life, and the two are not inseparable. Holy Motors is not a play but a selection of moments, comprising a complete life from birth to love to death, that dares us to call it nothing but an act.

Holy Motors (2012 France/Germany 116 mins)

Prod Co: Pierre Grise Productions/Théo Films/Arte France Cinema/Pandora Film/WDR/Arte/Soficinéma 8/Wild Bunch Prod: Martine Marignac, Maurice Tinchant, Albert Prévost Dir, Scr: Leos Carax Phot: Caroline Champetier, Yves Cape Ed: Nelly Quettier Prod Des: Florian Sanson Art Dir: Emmanuelle Cuillery Cos Des: Anaïs Romand

Cast: Denis Lavant, Édith Scob, Eva Mendes, Kylie Minogue, Élise L’Homeau, Jeanne Disson, Michel Piccoli, Leos Carax

Endnotes