Leos Carax burst on the film scene back in 1984 with his
debut feature, Boy Meets Girl, a quiet, charming work that
signaled that a major talent had arrived. In the 21 years since his exquisite
third film, Les Amants du Pont-Neuf (1991), Carax has turned
out only a short and two features, and each has been highly anticipated by his
growing fan base.
His latest feature, Holy Motors, which opened this week, is an
incredibly ambitious yet playful work that finds his immaculately talented
onscreen alter-ego, actor Denis Lavant, assuming a variety of roles as a
mysterious man who tackles a number of “jobs” (each requiring a different
identity) in the span of a single day.
Carax structured the film so that his protagonist can move
easily from genre to genre. The only information we're given about him at the
outset (which may or may not be the reality of his life) is that he's a rich
man who is picked up in the morning by a chauffeur (Edith Scob) who transports him to each of his assignments. Thus, Lavant slides into a number of different personas: a
pathetic homeless man, an impossibly limber motion-capture model, an urban dad with a shy
teenage daughter, an old man ready to die, a hitman, a forlorn lover and, most
memorably, a sewer-dwelling troglodyte who terrorizes Paris and claims as his prize
a hot model (Eva Mendes).
And there I dispense with plot, as I'm sure Carax wanted to
do in the creation of this picture. The list above leaves out an absolutely
wonderful musical interlude where, apropos of nothing, Lavant leads a motley
(but killer) accordion band through what looks to be an abandoned church. Throughout
the picture, Carax connects with a number of movie genres, from Jacques
Demy-like romance to Ishiro Honda-inspired city-trashing, having fun all the
way. The main virtue of Holy Motors is its wild unpredictability.
Although this is his first feature shot on digital, Carax
puts his love of film at the forefront, starting the proceedings with a
Lavant-less prologue in which he, Leos, makes up and wanders in his pajamas
into a movie palace filled with immobile, seemingly sleeping, patrons. When a
filmmaker acknowledges at the outset that the film we're watching is his dream,
absolutely anything is possible.
Like the anthology features made in recent years by Wong
Kar-Wai, Jim Jarmusch, and Takeshi Kitano, the film plays at first like an
“interim” work, which has fortunately spawned some bravura set-pieces that rank
with the best of Carax's work. The vignettes each have their virtues, with the
troglodyte segment (spun out of Carax's contribution to the anthology feature
Tokyo!) being the most feverishly weird and entertaining,
and the sequence in which Lavant plays a dying old man feeling the hardest to
wade through – especially since its dour tone is shortly followed by two broadly
comic moments.
As noted above, the film provides a tour-de force showcase
for Lavant. We see him applying and removing makeup in the limo, but once he appears in each vignette, he is fully transformed and demonstrates that
he’s a character actor extraordinaire (who can also be a very unconventional
leading man). There is literally nothing out of the range of his small frame
and visage.
As a further homage to the glories of cinema past, the
supporting cast has some very familiar faces. Besides Eva Mendes (whose job as “Beauty”
is to simply attract Lavant’s Beast), Carax has scored a cameo by the legendary
Michel Piccoli, who costarred in his terrific evocation of silent cinema and
the French New Wave, Mauvais Sang (1986). Piccoli is one of
the few actors still alive (besides, obviously, Moreau and Leaud) who carries with him a
wealth of French cinematic references – from Le Mepris to
Belle du Jour and on and on.
Also offering cinematic echoes of her own is the actress
playing the dutiful chauffeur. Edith Scob dons a white mask in one of the film’s
final scenes, evoking her unforgettable starring role in George Franju’s horror
classic Eyes Without a Face (1960). On a lesser level, Kylie
Minogue appears in the segment intended to evoke Demy, bringing with her a pop
stardom that echoes that of the ye-ye girls and “dollybird” singers who
appeared in Sixties comedies and pop fantasies.
What some sour souls may see as the deficits in Holy
Motors — its jumps in tone, its expectation that the viewer will
follow along from scene to scene, its very odd payoff(s) — makes it one of the most adventurous
films to appear in some time (from a director not named von Trier) and a very rewarding
head trip.
*****
I’ve been talking about Carax’s work on the Funhouse TV show
for several years now. The first episode I did about him was back in 1995.
Foremost among the items shown at that time were his musical moments, beginning
with this lovely visualization of a number by the “Anthony Newley-era” David
Bowie from Boy Meets Girl (1984):
Carax does indeed do miraculous work visualizing pop music
(yet has never made a music-video yet, bless ’im). One his best-ever moments is
this mega-kinetic celebration of the joy of love, enacted by Lavant in
Mauvais Sang (1986):
The film that “broke” Carax in France, but has since become
a beloved cult film (and is thus far his masterwork) is the very unique love
story Les Amants du Pont-Neuf (1991), aka “Lovers on the
Bridge” on American DVD. Here is the trailer (and, yes, that is Juliette
Binoche waterskiing on the Seine):
Pola X (1999) was his return to
filmmaking after the difficulties caused by Les Amants. It’s
the most difficult of his five features (the whole film is available in French here) and contains several moments that are intended to be highly jarring, like this
dream sequence:
I interviewed Carax in conjunction with opening of
Pola X in 2000. Here is a slice of him meditating on his
inability to get films made:
Here is the trailer for Holy Motors:
And I can’t resist adding the German trailer, which is structured
around the band-in-church musical sequence:
No comments:
Post a Comment