Restless, slippery works populate the filmography of Leos Carax, the French writer-director best known for a peculiar stripe of romanticism that is at once wistful and hard-bitten, exemplified in films such as Boy Meets Girl and Lovers on the Bridge. It has been over a decade since Carax's last feature, and after this extended drought, the director's bizarre new film, Holy Motors, arrives like monsoon of images and ideas, crackling with bitter Gallic mirth. It is quite unlike anything Carax has created before, and worlds removed from the even the most unconventional narrative features that have alighted in American theaters this year.
The film opens with a strange prelude in which a man (Carax) awakens and unlocks a door to a cavernous theater filled with silent filmgoers. From there, the viewer is ushered into the fractured world of the gnomish Mr. Oscar (the superb Denis Levant, of Tuvalu, Beau Travail, and, well, almost every Carax film). Over the course of a single day, Oscar is chauffeured about Paris in a stretch limousine, driven by the prim Céline (Édith Scob). His job seems to entail playing roles in various vignettes, many of which resemble scenarios from genre films. At different points, he assumes the identity of a hunched homeless woman; a menacing gangster; an anxious father; a wealthy financier; a grotesque madman; a masked anarchist; and an elderly man on his deathbed. To this end, his limo is outfitted like a mobile dressing room, complete with costumes, props, and supplies for elaborate makeup effects.
The limo scenes that frame Oscar's “appointments” are presented naturally, with minimal exposition: the actor digs through clothing and wigs, reviews dossiers, smokes relentlessly, and chit-cats wearily with Céline. The appointments themselves, meanwhile, are often shamelessly melodramatic or comically absurd, when they are not drifting into flat-out dream-logic. During one stop, Oscar performs martial arts acrobatics and simulated sex in a motion-capture chamber. In two separate encounters, he seems to murder his doppelganger, only to arise and scurry off to the next destination. The film's scenes ooze and hiccup into one another, blurring the lines between Oscar's performances and his authentic self (if he even has one).
Whether the viewer will find the demented narrative and erratic tonal hopscotching of Holy Motors engrossing or merely exasperating will likely turn on how willing they are to revel in strangeness for strangeness' sake. Carax's film has the gleam of an thoroughly uncompromised work of cinema, but it feels less than essential, more concerned with impishly upending conventions than in finding a deeper meaning beneath its fairy-tale musings on modernity. However, if gleefully trampling filmgoers' expectations is the only thing a work of perverse surrealism needs to do right, then Holy Motors is a clear success.
