Making movies is like playing a musical instrument—it helps to stay in practice. That’s why it’s such a wondrous surprise that Leos Carax’s new film, “Holy Motors” (which opens today at Film Forum and Film Society of Lincoln Center), seems at once so precise and so freewheeling, so exactingly conceived and yet so spontaneous. It’s the work of a filmmaker past fifty who hasn’t made a feature in thirteen years, and who at the start of the film, he dramatizes his own isolation and reëmergence in a scene that shows his hesitant, discreet return to a movie theatre. Despite or perhaps because of the passage of time, Carax has made a film of an extraordinarily youthful vigor. It’s all the more astonishing in that his subject is age, along with its inevitable frustration, degradation, disappointment, regret, and loss. It’s also a paean to a life in the cinema—not one devoid of sentimentality, but one in which the sentimentality is intensely and precisely motivated, like old war stories, by the price it exacts. It’s a movie that arises after the end of cinema, a phoenix of a new cinema. Few films have dramatized as wisely and as poignantly the art that, like the two reels at each end of the camera and the projector, gives with one hand and takes with the other. And few films give so harrowing a sense of staring death in the face and so exhilarating a sense of coming back to tell the tale with a self-deprecating whimsy.
It’s apt that “Holy Motors” tells the story of an actor. I remember an interview from decades ago in which Carax—one of the meteoric geniuses of the modern cinema, whose second feature, “Bad Blood,” from 1986, made when he was twenty-five, is an unrivalled profusion of precocious poetic virtuosity and romantic vision—said that the great privilege of making films is the possibility of working with actors. Most great directors are also expert at casting and, for that matter, at styling, costume, and makeup. Jean-Luc Godard (in whose “King Lear” Carax plays a small role) may be one of the cinema’s great philosophical intellectuals, but he also has also invented several great stars and picked clothing and hairstyles that remain iconic. So it is with Carax, who chose Denis Lavant—magician, mime, and acrobat— for his first feature, “Boy Meets Girl,” and, in “Bad Blood,” put him alongside two young women, Julie Delpy and Juliette Binoche, who made decisive impressions. Lavant is one of the key actors of recent decades, one who, like classic-era movie actors, conveys an entire world of inner fury in perfect immobility—but who is no Methodical thespian but a hurricane of physical energy and an epicure of grace.
Here, Lavant is the very subject of the film. He plays Monsieur Oscar, a potentate who, leaving home in the morning to the loving farewells of wife and children, enters a stretch limo under the watchful eyes of bodyguards and, once securely inside, talks via cell phone with a colleague about matters of high finance until, receiving a dossier from his driver, the elderly platinum beauty Madame Céline (Edith Scob, the star of Georges Franju’s 1959 drama of uncanny horror, “Eyes Without a Face”), he removes his disguise and dons another costume—as a broken-down elderly beggar who wanders onto the street and seeks help from passers-by. The deliberate indirection sets the film’s template: Oscar is actually an actor—albeit one who plays his roles and performs his scripted action in actual settings in and around Paris. He gets his roles and scripts in the back seat of the limousine, where he does his own elaborate makeup, eats his takeout meals, and, en route from location to location, engages in sharp and friendly banter with Madame Céline, who is also something of a personal assistant and a source of moral support. Oscar transforms the world into movies minus cameras, and Carax, unseen, supplies the camera.
For Carax, it’s not the cinema that’s done but just the old cinema (one that’s old not in years but in assumptions). His new one is as full of stories and plot lines as any classical drama, and it reprises many of the tropes of classical cinema (a hit man, a family saga of money and marriage, a topical and engagé political thriller), but it does so toward prismatic ends. On the one hand, the stories bursts onto the screen like the inner projections of a director’s imagination. On the other, they reveal the devastating sacrifice of an actor’s energy that these wild imaginings demand. The deepest and widest possible approach to life—namely, cinema—imposes the most hermetic of disciplines.
The filmmaker, in his solitude, contains multitudes, but it’s the actor who makes those multitudes real—who bears the emotional burden of each transformation, of each role, and who, in finding his many identities, runs the ultimate risk: losing his own. The devastating moral effect of costume and makeup becomes evident from the very first quick-change, and gives rise to a surprising comparison. Sofia Coppola’s “Somewhere” is also the story of an actor who spends lots of time in a car; that actor—an alienated one, who never successfully unifies his work and his private life, and for whom performing is mainly a means to a mercenary end—faces a primal moral terror and glimmer of enlightenment as he sits for a test of a full-head mask that turns him, under the camera’s gaze, into an old man. Oscar, by contrast, is an artist of consummate devotion, a master of disguise who finds terrifying reserves of passion in each character, not least in a character of exactly the kind of goofy fantasy that’s so often an object of derision. If Carax shows himself in a sort of monastic isolation, it also comes off as a variety of penance: he alone knows what he has put his actors through.
Entering a movie studio, Oscar dons a motion-capture suit that’s spangled with reflective sensors that lock into beams of light. The tumbles he does alone in scenes of fighting and evasion and the fury of his running on a comical treadmill make for some of the most glorious scenes of onscreen dance since the age of the great musicals. But the point is clear, and it’s similar to the one suggested by Coppola’s depiction of an action hero off-screen: even a C.G.I. fantasy, played persuasively, extracts from its performers as much of a psychological exertion as a physical one.
The anarchic gnome called “Merde”—the sewer-dwelling beast that Lavant played in a short by Carax for the compilation film “Tokyo”—passes through the Père Lachaise cemetery and interrupts a fashion shoot by the American photographer Harry T. Bone. With a signal act of comic violence, he carries off the model (Eva Mendes) with whom he’s instantly smitten. Here Carax doesn’t just mock the vulgar debasement of women by frivolous predators but, as in the motion-capture dance, he locates the authentic core of beauty and inner force that even those debased representations depend on. Once more, he seeks and finds the moral triumph of the performer.
Carax puts Oscar through nine (or ten) changes of character, and the ambiguity is itself a crucial part of the movie, which depends on the very question of what constitutes an identity, and whether there’s any such thing, for a movie person, as a true and livable life away from movies. For Carax, identity is a matter of imagination, and cinema is a crucial forge for imagination. The actor who leaves home in the morning to the halcyon calls of wife and children is already in costume and acting, and he returns home at night to give another kind of performance.
Running through the film are traces of Carax’s previous movies—the glossly elderly woman, as seen in “Boy Meets Girl” and “Bad Blood”; Michel Piccoli, here (as in “Bad Blood”) seen with a disarmingly blatant bit of makeup; the presence of the (now-shuttered) department store La Samaritaine, which was featured prominently in “The Lovers on the Bridge”; a performance by Nastya Golubeva Carax, his daughter with the late actress Katerina Golubeva (to whom the film is dedicated); and, of course, the character “Merde.” These are only a few of the insider references that give “Holy Motors” the feel of an artistic life being relived. Oscar’s scene with Carax’s daughter is a father-daughter fight of a searing poignancy, a vision of the kind of tiny but devastating soul-deaths that, in quick and passing moments, mark a child and a parent forever.
The wild joy of music comes in an interlude featuring a blues-slamming accordion-and-percussion band parading exuberantly through a church while playing (thanks to Mike D’Angelo for identifying it) a version of R. L. Burnside’s blues burner “Let My Baby Ride,” as captured in long and swinging tracking shots. Its tragedy comes to life in a performance (at the vestiges of La Samaritaine) by Kylie Minogue, another icon of the late eighties whose very presence, along with her role, conjures a return from the burning-up of lost time—and, again, its terrible price.
One aside in the film satirizes the making of movies with small digital cameras, yet the movie’s liberating and liberated spontaneity owes much to them (and, of course, to the cinematography of Caroline Champetier, who, having worked with Godard in the eighties, learned about lapidary filming on the wing). For all its visionary grandeur and technical wizardry, “Holy Motors” has the feel of handicraft. For all of its theatrical confection, it has the immediacy of a documentary. The long wait for its creation and the rapidity of its production conjure a sense of astonishing temporal density.
Carax sends viewers home with an extraordinary vision that answers the very question of the movie’s title. The primordial romantic Wordsworth wrote, “Dear God! The very houses seem asleep.” Carax shows, in a conceit as antic as wondrous, as goofy as transcendent, what if, before they dozed off, those walls could talk… This comical animism—a twist on a classic children’s movie—offers a glimpse at an atheistic beyond, at the physical world’s metaphysical dimensions. These images and sounds that reveal the mind in matter and the soul in bodies suggest Carax’s ultimate definition of the cinema, and it’s one of the best and grandest that a movie has ever offered.
