HOLY MOTORS (2012)

HOLY MOTORS begins with a shot of a movie audience asleep before the big screen. We cut to a man, played by the director Leos Carax, waking up from sleep and walking around his hotel room before finally unlocking a hidden door set in one of the walls with forest-patterned wallpaper, with a key that seems to be one of his fingers. He walks through a corridor and ends up on the balcony of that movie theatre, looking down on the sleeping audience, while initially babies and then menacing dogs start walking down the aisle. Does Carax mean to say that we, as the movie-watching audience, have fallen asleep watching the brain-deadening tripe onscreen which the Soviet director Dziga Vertov once called “the new opiate of the masses”? Does Carax, therefore, intend to wake us up? Well, if you have been asleep, you’ll bloody well wake up, that’s for sure.

A film like HOLY MOTORS is both a humbling as well as an exhilarating experience. You realize how little you know and understand cinema, how much lies just around the corner of your comprehension. At the same time, it opens up whole vistas in front of your eyes, a dazzling exposition of the possibilities of the medium. There is not a frame in this movie which bored me, not a scene which did not leave me gasping in wonderment, not a moment when I was not excited about what was to come next. This is a movie which cannot be categorized neatly. It falls most easily under the all-encompassing generic umbrella of drama, but you can hardly leave it at that. There are deathbed confessions, abductions, musical numbers, animated monsters, romantic reunions, assassinations—virtually everything we have to come to expect of cinema in all our years of watching it. The wonder of it is, we have never come to expect all of these in a single film.

This is not a film, just as The Beatles’ 1968 masterpiece THE WHITE ALBUM was not an album. It was an attempt to summarize all of Western music across a sprawling, batshit-crazy 30-song suite. THE WHITE ALBUM condensed centuries of musical traditions, invented a few more of its own and united all of them under the banner of rock in a single coherent album. HOLY MOTORS tries to do something similar, although it has only about a century of cinematic conventions and traditions to utilize, to play with and to destroy. It is, in the truest sense, a post-cinematic product, meaning that this is a work of art that cannot be recreated effectively in any other medium.

You know how all movie characters live “inside” a movie? Well, Monsieur Oscar, our enigmatic hero, knows he lives “inside” a movie. He is an actor. Although not in the sense you imagine. Or perhaps just in the sense you imagine. He is driven around Paris by his female chauffeur Celine (Edith Scob, quietly effective), playing a number of acting roles around the city, in a demented version of the angels in WINGS OF DESIRE. The thing is, here everyone seems to be living in a movie version of their own life. He plays a beggar, a businessman, an assassin hired to shoot that very businessman, a father, a dying man, a madman obsessed by a model played by Eva Mendes. You really have to see the film to understand what I am talking about. This is a film never attempted before. As such, it has no conventions, no framework to work with, except the ones it borrows from other genres of cinema.

Most movies and most directors would have been satisfied to leave their film at that, as simply an audacious experiment in film-making and nothing more. But the film is so, so much more than this, piling on layer after mesmerizing layer, theme after engrossing theme. It is an exploration of regret, of the “road not taken”, of the ravages of time, of people changing almost beyond recognition, of missed opportunities. And of the terrible shortcoming of life, that it cannot be re-winded like a movie. Like Kylie Minogue sings in the film, “Who were we, when we were who we were, back then? Who would we have become if we’d done differently back then?” In a sense, this is why Monsieur Oscar is an actor playing several characters every day, as an ode of love to all the other selves he might have become, if he had made some different choices in his life. Don’t we all live in thrall to the hypothesis of “What if…?”?  

(This above scene is one of the most euphoric and mesmerizing I have ever seen, very much in the vein of impromptu song-and-dance numbers in musicals around the world, even in Bollywood)

The film also deals with becoming irrelevant in a world which has no place for nostalgic dinosaurs. Monsieur Oscar misses the cameras “that used to be heavier than us”. Now it seems they are so small they almost can’t be seen. The limousine that he drives in is symptomatic of this technological gap. The world is in awe of the small now. There is no place for monstrous machines of this magnitude anymore. He is tired of this job he has been doing for so long. It seems he wants to be himself for a change. But does he have a unique individual self, or is he just a pastiche of all the characters he has ever embodied-- an empty vessel, so to say? No answers there.

The anchor amidst all this madness is Denis Lavant, the actor playing The Actor. He is transcendent. With stunning exactitude, he goes through with the madness of the film with a gravitas that endows every role he plays with a much-needed sincerity, especially since Leos Carax is always winking at us from behind the camera, to make us smile at his every ingenious nuance. The emotional depth of the film is, to a large extent, the work of Lavant, playing madman and father with equal ease.

An exhilarating journey into the heart of cinema and a dishevelled, irreverent, priapic exploration of life itself. Classic for the ages. 9.5/10.