(the) film is strange
Oscar, dressed in a motion capture suit and toting a machine gun, steps onto a treadmill in front of a large screen projecting shape and colour of green, black, red and white. The treadmill rolls faster and faster as we move in closer and closer. He screams and fires his gun, running manically against an increasingly white background, resembling a jerky figure in a zoetrope viewed through a slit; the sight of one object, the illusion of one smooth movement, created from many images.
He falls off the treadmill. The journey from the future of cinema back to its embryonic stages has exhausted him, as the hands of
Metropolis' clock did Freder, flesh tortured by mechanics, the soul stretched like pizza dough over levers, racks and cogs.
Chauffeured around Paris, Oscar invests himself in various guises. He steps out of the door as an old lady beggar, a mischievous tramp, a hitman or a disgruntled father. Thus the zoetrope is metaphorical for Oscar's existence – many roles and many images in one - and, as with the zoetrope, his oneness is a trick or a mirage. He doesn't fully exist; except off-stage, possibly, in the back of that limousine.
He is weary, lost perhaps, mourning maybe. There is something in him of the man in the old footage (by Etienne Jules Marey) that opens the film – naked, running to and fro like a rat in a maze.
”I who have been many men in vain want to be one and myself”
“Neither am I anyone; I have dreamt the world as you dreamt your work, my Shakespeare, and among the forms in my dream are you, who like myself are many and no one
[
Everything and Nothing, Jorge Luis Borges] - Introductory quote to
Holy Motors press kit
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We know by the folders of assignments waiting for him on the back seat and the man who comes to monitor his progress, that his role-playing constitutes a job. He is an actor. We know that he takes pride in it, in the importance and form of his acts (“la beaute du geste”) and we observe how he takes great care over his transformations. Oscar considers it to be a vocation, a higher duty. But is the geste only a gesture (now). Is it just momentum, the fading echo of a defunct lifestyle?
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Oscar never faces the world as himself. He never faces it without a costume or without makeup, or without an adopted name. It is as if he doesn't want to be himself.
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It isn't possible to develop a theory of everything for a film as full of nuance and diverse trains of thought as
Holy Motors, but you can approach it as M. Merde approaches the model Kay M, with esurient awe, and let its presence and perfume move around you.
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It is a lament. Has there been a tragedy? Has it driven him to an awful fate of ceaseless reincarnation? Has he thrown himself into a futureless role because, without a future, the past's grief cannot flourish, a history cannot be established and human bonds cannot be forged.
Oscar as Le Mourant : “Nothing makes you feel more alive than to see others die”
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Oscar meets an old acquaintance, a similarly mysterious actor named Jean. She sings a song in which she wails : “we had a child”. Has a child of his really died? Is that child something else : cinema, happiness, one's own fragile life?
The one role he plays whose emotions overflow back into the limousine, and the only one for which he drives a car (exerting a modicum of what you could call control) as opposed to being driven, is that of a father to a young teenage girl called Ang
èle. She lies to him about a party and, returning to the limousine, he hurls his wig away in anger. He told her that her punishment was to be her. Oscar's is the same.
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He waits for her outside a party from which the lines “I can't get you out of my head”, “you're more than I dare to think about” and “won't you stay...forever and ever....and ever” (Kylie Minogue's
Can't Get You Out Of My Head) loudly pulse. Having dropped her off, he watches her recede in the wing mirror. Was it a daughter that he lost?
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There is always real within fiction. A photo taken by a character remains on that camera, a document of that person at that time. The river water which drenched Reverend Harry Powell must dry from Robert Mitchum's suit. And yet because there is real in unreal and unreal in real, this escape to art can never be an escape.
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Roles leave marks on you. You carry them with you. Edith Scob, who plays Oscar's chauffeuse Celine, dons, at the end of her shift, the mask she wore as Christiane in Georges Franju's
Eyes Without A Face over forty years before. The ghosts of French cinema are out there.
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Is this a mere throwaway throwback (and not everything in a film must carry the same significance), an illustration of an idea, or something more personal to Celine? Is Celine's face/identity not restored (or under construction)? What is her story?
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The plaintive song which plays the last time we see Oscar, “Revivre” (G
érard Manset), cries out of things unfinished, of points of no return, of diving into the cold liquid of groundhog days (“plonger dans le froid liquide des jours toujours les m
êmes”), of finishing dreams and of feeling the sap rising within you (“sentir monter la sève”).
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A lament about the death of cinema and the death of faith: People “don't believe what they are seeing” anymore, now that technology has made cameras invisible.
People are becoming mere tools and materials from which other (inhuman) images are extrapolated. The motion capture session, essentially full body puppetry, is for the purpose of a (porno)graphic of devilish creatures cavorting. Which image is controlling the other?
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He meets Elise, another professional 'al fresco' actor. If all the world's a stage, could everyone be a player?
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Holy Motors could be autobiographical : it is dedicated, in its last moments, to Katia Golubeva, Mr. Carax's partner, who died the year before the film was released. Their daughter features in the film, probably as a little girl we see trapped, as if abandoned, behind a window. Oscar may be Monsieur Carax, a man throwing himself into the process of making art, to escape, to honour and to remember:
LE(
OS CAR)AX.
Mrs Golubeva is buried in Pere Lachaise cemetery, which appears in the film on three occasions.
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Oscar is filling holes in others' lives. He is meeting needs. The daughter in the car accepts this supposed imposter as her father. Does Oscar play the role regularly? Is her father only a character? If her father exists, Oscar is filling his absence. How sad...and how kind...
Does Oscar play the role of M.Merde enough times to create the pile of money and jewels in his cave, or is he just standing in for him? For whose benefit does the outfit / disguise have to be so perfected?
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He is a sort of angel, then, in these 'holy', cars. Celine calls another holy motorist : "Ectoplasm on wheels". Are the drivers ghosts?
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Oscar kills the first role we see him play (the banker), and then the gangster Theo (another doppelganger), a role he may have played previously. This is a sort of suicide, self-defeating.
If they are not real people that he is mimicking, does he leave avatars in the world where they become independent flesh and blood?
Do characters take on a life of their own?
Method, madness.
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The roles Oscar inhabits are raw, intensely transformative, quietly introspective and fearlessly demonstrative – they are Oscar-bait roles.
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M.Merde is an uninhibited taboo-breaker. He runs over graves, chomps on bouquets of flowers, kicks a blind man's cane from under him, licks a woman's armpit, kidnaps her, dresses her up in a burka (illegal to wear in public in France) and then lies naked in her lap, creating a pietà, which plays into the motif of a dead child – here Mary mourning Jesus.
The scene featuring Merde and Kay is the only one that doesn't end with a return to the limousine. As she sings the man a lullaby it merely fades to black, proposing an especial significance to that pietà.
Tellingly, M.Merde emerges into the light from beneath the cemetery (
à propos of Katia Golubeva), a glomerulus of instincts. He is out of control. What does grief look like?
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With all this pain, and with such bafflement, the exuberant accordion interval is a palate cleanser, an energising balm.
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Jean plays an air hostess called Eva Grace. When she takes off her hair and her coat, Eva is revealed. Her persona is underneath while Oscar's are ostensibly worn on top. Who is the character and who isn't? Can they be cleaved? Do the traces become indelible?
“Is it you?”, she asks. “I think so?” he says.
“Are those your eyes?”
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Jean sings, in gutted department store Samaritaine, with the body parts of mannequins sprinkled about the shop floor: “Who were we when we were who we were back then?” Simply transposing this into the present tense communicates their existential rootlessness : “Who are we when we are who we are...?” Did they meet as themselves long ago or as dual role players in each other's stories, much as Oscar and role-player Elise had enacted his deathbed scene as uncle and niece.
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Because Oscar reveals so little of himself (if there is a himself) to us, we can take Jean as a mirror to Oscar. When they meet, he talks to her through a half-open car window (on stage to off), his face reflected in its surface. One could make a case for all the people he meets and all the people he inhabits being aspects of himself - a negative space that outlines his enigmatic shape.
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Eva / Jean whispers “come...come closer” to an unseen or non-existent companion and then throws herself of the roof. Who dies? Are we the companion? Is the art alive without a watcher?
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Their limousines are magical. If Oscar can make it to the car alive, whether perforated by bullet holes or stab wounds, he will be miraculously healed to full (physical) health. Is he already dead?
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At day's end, when they are no longer monitored, the limousines worry about their imminent obsolescence. If they do cease to exist, that means there will be no role-players. Would there then be no difference between true and untrue? Would cinema, in a place of invisible cameras, have returned to the world?
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They and their cargo are quite possibly spiritually linked. One of the posters for
Holy Motors features the silhouette of a man whose eyes are represented by the headlamps of a limousine.
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Is the man with a birthmark more than a director to Oscar's actor. Is he
the director? The birthmark deflects (or merely delays) suspicions, given that he must be born of woman, that he is God.
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Oscar's last appointment of the day involves being the father to a family of apes, which is another return to the past and to nature. The disco lights from Angèle's party are now echoed on the bedroom walls of his ape child.
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Indignity haunts Oscar. He has no repose. Only the desert.
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Despite the eternal repetition of Oscar's life, time is always at his back. He must be punctual. He tells Celine that they must laugh before midnight.
A midnight deadline à la Cinderella, a girl who was magically allowed to play a role she'd always dreamt of. Twice we see a woman take off her shoes. First, the motion capture lady (with whom Oscar simulates sex) flicks off an invisible pair, and then Jean/Eva removes hers before her suicide. We are also shown an extended close up of M. Merde's dirty bare feet.
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There are fairytales fluttering at the lights. Oscar walks around a corner and vanishes.
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Art is a form of philosophy.
Holy Motors is a film of thoughts and of questions.
There are many ways of approaching
Holy Motors and many keys you can try. The room you finally enter into may not be more beautiful than the one you have left behind. Explanation can mitigate awe. It will never fully satisfy, but the process will.
The film is fascinating. The seemingly incongruent episodes work together, as if the film's soul is a 2 hour long note thrummed on a tuning fork and each job is another struck in the same key, distinct but complementary.
Holy Motors, not for its hard content but for its explorable emotional and intellectual space, is a film that will last.
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