Take the ride: Leos Carax’s “Holy Motors”

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:

An echo chamber in his larynx: Deceased Artiste Andy Williams (part two of two)

Since I’ve discussed what was utterly misguided on The Andy Williams Show — but is compellingly watchable in many instances as Sixties TV kitsch — I have to talk about what did work wonderfully. The show’s best element was the many duos and trios that Andy did with singers who were of his “generation” (and older). As a quick fer-instance, he did two incredibly smooth duets with Brazilian singers, “The Girl from Ipanema” with Antonio Carlos Jobim, and the less-often-heard but equally beautiful “Samba de Verao” (Summer Song) with Marcos Valle: 

Given his background as a “boy singer” backing up Kay Thompson, it makes perfect sense that he dueted well with female singers, and that he did with Peggy Lee and the one and only Lady Ella. His duet with Aretha Franklin doesn’t hit the right note, to the point that Andy has to make fun of how un-soulful he is (to see a white variety-show host keep up with Aretha, check out Tom Jones’s wonderful duet with her).

One of my favorite under-appreciated performers was singer-songwriter Roger Miller, who came up with a string of great fast-paced, humorous country singles in the Sixties (and the timeless “King of the Road”). Andy and he dueted on “In the Summertime (You Don’t Want My Love).” Roger handles the humor on that one (replete with eefin’ action!).

More appropriate for Andy are the times he sang opposite other male singers, including the leagues of great male lounge-MOR performers of the Sixties. Like all the other middle-aged balladeers, he had the opportunity to work with the guy who influenced them all, Bing Crosby. He also did a spirited duet with the eternally smooth Tony Bennett on “This Could Be the Start of Something Big” (written by his former mentor Steve Allen, and performed here with the Count Basie band).

The most energetic numbers Andy performed are the show were always in the company of two other male singers (shades of his work with his brothers?). This set-up happened frequently on the show, usually with Bobby Darin in the trio. This occurred with Tony Martin and Eddie Fisher as the third side of the triangle. The oddest combo has got to be Darin and the always-amazing Anthony Newley (who has “long hair” for a 1966 variety show). Both Bobby and Tony seem to be into goofin’ around:

Also of note to me (and Funhouse folk who love this guy’s ultra-lounge-iness) is Andy’s warbling with the always amazin’ Buddy Greco. Trini Lopez is the third side in this instance, doing the full version of “America” (which seems rather odd out of context):

Sammy Davis Jr. was a ubiquitous presence on variety shows, and never, ever gave a less than energetic performance. Here he joins Andy to sing “Breezin’ Along with the Breeze”:

And of course, Funhouse viewers know I am fixated by the comedian everyone hates to love and loves to hate, the one and only Jerry Lewis. The most interesting exchange here occurs when Jerry is shouting his lines as usual, and Andy notes, “I’m not used to being yelled at.” Jer’s reply? “That’s how I lost my partner…”

*****

Leaving behind Williams’ variety show, I move back to his recording career and must point out the fact that, after a certain point in time, it seemed like Williams was always singing instrumentals. Perfoming what sounded like a hastily-lyricized vocal version of an instrumental was a staple of most singers’ repertoire at that time, but it did seem like Andy did a LOT of those prefabricated tunes. The MOR station my family listened to during the day, WNEW-AM, was constantly debuting Williams doing a vocal version of a popular instrumental, usually a movie theme.

Thus, Andy could be heard warbling “the Exodus theme,” “A Summer Place,” “Charade,” “More,” his big hit “The Days of Wine and Roses, “A Time for Us,” and the very, very smarmy “Love Story theme.” Probably the last in the decade-plus series of movie themes sung by Andy was the Godfather theme, “Speak Softly Love.” A great movie theme, but a rather lame song (sorry, Al Martino).

One of the sorriest excuses for a lyric has got to be the set of verses written to be sung to the “Love Theme” originally recorded and brought to No. 1 in 1974 by the Love Unlimited Orchestra, a Barry White project. I remember thinking even as a child that it was a pretty sorry excuse for a song – and little did I know there was a disco remix of Andy's version:

The single best adaptation of an instrumental ever sung by Williams was most definitely “Music To Watch Girl By,” which is emblematic of the MOR Sixties in ways I can't even describe. Feast:

******

Like a lot of MOR singers, Williams covered a whole bunch of contemporary songs in order to find a new hit or fill up his albums (most likely both). Many of the songs weren't right for his musical style, but that makes them all the more fun to listen to now.

For a long time it was rumored that the version of “Aquarius” from Hair sung by Andy and the Osmond Brothers was left on the moon by Neil Armstrong as a strange souvenir of planet Earth. This story is debunked in this article on the Check the Evidence site. However, the recording still remains a wonderful relic of the time that “old” met “new” and the result was wonderfully cheesy:

Andy recorded a lot of songs that seem really fucking odd when heard in his echo-y silken style. Among them is the Classics IV hit “Spooky”:

After his variety show left the air, Williams continued to appear on network TV. Some of those appearances made sense (as with the homepsun Xmas specials). And some were very, very strange, as when he sang Randy Newman's “Short People” with singer-songwriter Paul Williams:

****

I started this tribute out by noting that there are some Andy Williams songs that make me cringe (“The Most Wonderful Time of the Year”) and others that I never tire of listening to. The two that dwarf all others in the latter category (standing tall beside “Music to Watch Girls By”) are his catchiest pop singles.

The first is “Can't Get Used to Losing You” (1963), written by Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman. Covered wonderfully by the English Beat in 1980 (with an echo-ridden sound that seems to duplicate Williams' original, with a great ska backbeat), the song is one of the catchiest and best things Williams ever sang:

And finally, the Williams record that is surely his best-ever serving of “pure pop for now people” (thanks, Nick). It's upbeat, fully orchestrated, and uses Andy's self-generated echo chamber to best advantage. Danny Boyle used it brilliantly in a mocking sense as the end theme for his 1994 dog-eat-dog thriller Shallow Grave (watch it here, but you spoiler-shy cowards may not want to partake before seeing the whole flick).

The song remains a pure delight and a kick-ass bit of an AM radio timewarp :