Leos Carax (2012)

There’s never a dull visual moment in Holy Motors.  This is the second film of 2012 in which a stretch limo is the central location but it’s used to much more entertaining effect here than in Cosmopolis.  The back of the car is where Leos Carax’s protagonist Monsieur Oscar (Denis Lavant) prepares for each appointment in his very full diary.  It’s where he reads the script for/dossier on his next assignment.  It’s also his dressing room:  Oscar applies elaborately various make-up and changes from one wig and costume into another.  There’s a good joke when the car has a minor collision with another vehicle which the camera then reveals to be an identical stretch limo.   Once the main action of the film is over, Oscar’s elderly but elegant PA/chauffeuse Céline (Edith Scob) returns the car to its home – a place with ‘Holy Motors’ in huge illuminated letters on the entrance.  The anthropomorphic flavour of ‘home’ is appropriate:  in the deserted car park, the stretch limos, their headlights winking, talk to one another.   Oscar’s conveyance travels Paris by day and after dark, and the place looks beautiful at all times.  Many of his appointments, though, take place in the city’s underbelly or on its margins – below ground in the streets, in anonymous rooms opening off warehouses or car parks, around a hotel fire exit.   Carax and his cinematographers Caroline Champetier and Yves Cape make all these sights and situations compelling.

Oscar has nine appointments in his diary.  These involve his taking on the appearance and character of:  an old beggar woman; a man in a bodysuit ‘studded with neon pustules’ (Ryan Gilbey’s phrase), who does solo acrobatics, then runs on a treadmill, and ends up in a sexual pas de deux with a statuesque woman in a similarly designed costume; a one-eyed satyr in a green corduroy suit, who devours the flowers left on graves in Père Lachaise (where the gravestone inscriptions invite people to visit the deceased’s website), paper currency and eventually the hair of the A-list model (Eva Mendes) whom Oscar abducts from a fashion shoot; a father collecting his daughter from a party; the principal accordionist in a marching band; a killer and the victim he stabs to death;  a man meeting up with an old flame (Kylie Minogue) shortly before she commits suicide; the assassin of a banker; and an ancient man in a deathbed conversation with his niece.  (Although that adds up to nine, I’m not sure if the accordion sequence – announced as an entr’acte ­- counts:  perhaps the murderer and the murderee are two appointments.)

There’s a fair bit of violence and much talk about death in Holy Motors (for which Carax also wrote the screenplay) – right through to the epilogue:  in the stretch limo dormitory, one of the cars reminds the others that it won’t be long before they’re consigned to a junk yard.  I kept thinking it’s when a movie deals with ‘big’ themes in this way that those who are condescending about cinema as an art form may feel most vindicated.   Although Carax’s images are consistently fascinating on a visual level, the ideas underpinning the story are relatively lacking in invention.  Two of Oscar’s first three personae are disturbing to conventional society.  The beggar woman, a mildly discomfiting eyesore for Parisian passers-by, is the starter in both senses.  The main course, also in more ways than one, is the voracious randy beast who kidnaps beauty and takes her to his subterranean lair.  There he dresses her in a burka while he strips himself naked, lying with his head in her lap and his cock persistently erect.  Carax makes familiar points about the tyranny of celebritising, famous-for-fifteen-minutes culture:  while this goat in the green suit terrifies the respectable visitors to Père Lachaise, the photographer at the fashion shoot immediately sees him as a photo opportunity.  As Holy Motors goes on, Oscar’s characters become more existentially preoccupied and melancholy.   This shift enables Carax to escape one of the risks of a prescribed episodic structure, with the same actor in multiple guises:  you don’t merely compare one episode and character with another (the Kind Hearts and Coronets syndrome).   But the melancholy is pretty shallow, almost luxurious if you enjoy (as I do) French songs about life and death with pretty melodies and banal metaphysical lyrics.   (Kylie Minogue sings one of these but the standout is ‘Revivre’ by Gérard Manset.)

The motif of swapped identity isn’t very brilliant either.   Angèle (Jeanne Disson), the teenage girl whose father picks her up, describes the withdrawn behaviour of her friend at the party they’ve been to.  By the end of the conversation it’s revealed that Angèle was talking about her own antisocial performance.   The knifeman appropriates his victim’s clothes and hair; the dead man returns to life to stab his killer and they lie side by side, identical twins with identical fatal wounds.   (And after Oscar has slain the banker the latter’s colleagues do the same to Oscar.)  When he meets the Minogue character she explains, in answer to his question as to whether she’s wearing her own eyes, that they belong to an air stewardess called Eva, whose last night on earth this is.   In the prologue, a man in pyjamas (Carax himself) lies on his bed with a white dog at one side of him; in Oscar’s last incarnation, his geriatric is in bed with a black dog on the other side. None of this is a major problem while you’re watching Holy Motors because it looks and moves so vividly and because Denis Lavant as Oscar is so remarkable.  Even so, it’s as well that Carax is concerned not only with the termination and écoulement of human life but also, more specifically and more interestingly, with the death of cinema.  (There’s a reminder of its beginnings in the fragments of Muybridge that Carax occasionally inserts.)  The prologue features an audience in a darkened theatre.  They’re asleep and not roused from their slumbers by the sounds of the film they’re not watching – a man’s frightened cry and the gunshots that follow.  The man played by Carax rises from his bed (perhaps in a dream).  After forcing his way out of his room, he wanders into another space to look down on the dormant cinemagoers.   It’s as if it’s his mission to wake them up (although by now the idea unfortunately evokes Aurora and The Dark Knight Rises).

In his Big Issue review, Edward Lawrenson suggested that Oscar’s protean existence could be seen to represent the different faces that we all put on for the various situations we confront.   That’s obviously true but it’s increasingly clear that Oscar is specifically an actor as well as everyman, and that, like the art form through which Carax presents his life, he’s becoming tired.  He falls during his treadmill routine, which leaves him badly out of breath.   Later on, an authoritative, slightly pompous man (Michel Piccoli in a cameo) appears to question whether Oscar’s heart is still in his performances.   (This man has a large mulberry birthmark running from temple to jaw on one side of his face:  it’s hard, in view of some of the other images in Holy Motors, not to see the birthmark as dried blood.)   Yet Denis Lavant’s versatile energy, like the vibrancy of Carax’s film-making, is more than enough to contradict the suggestions of entropy.   I’d never seen Lavant before and he is an extraordinary camera subject – he’s too extraordinary to transform himself entirely into different people but he infuses each one of the roles with a terrific blend of passion and humour.  According to Wikipedia, Lavant is ‘known for his distinctive face and the physically demanding aspects of the roles he plays, which often involve slapstick, acrobatics or dance, as well as for his long-standing association with director Leos Carax’.  While the physical stylisation of some of his playing can call to mind Marcel Marceau, Lavant is always quickly able to banish that unfortunate association:  his full-bloodedness is a million miles away from Marceau’s etiolated elaborateness.  Whereas Lavant’s character is inescapably stuck with playing parts to which the actor gives new life, Carax appears to want to suggest, in the final scene in which Edith Scob appears, that she is trapped forever in – or, to put it another way, immortalised by – her role in Eyes Without a Face.  At the end of the day Céline drops Oscar off at his home (he’s greeted there by his family, who are chimpanzees).  Alone in the stretch limo, she puts on the same mask that Scob wore in the Franju film of more than fifty years ago.

4 October 2012