"HOLY MOTORS" WORTH THE EFFORT

By Chuck Graham, TucsonStage.com

Are you really living if you must always be following someone else’s orders? That is the haunting question at the heart of the French abstractionist film “Holy Motors.”

Written and directed by Leos Carax, who is working again with Denis Lavant (“Pola X”), the often-confusing and occasionally disgusting film follows the disguise-artist Oscar through a day and night of “assignments” which have no apparent purpose.

The film begins without instruction as the leanly muscled Oscar gets out of bed in a generic room, lights a cigarette, then still in his pajamas walks around examining the walls. Through the bedroom window we see it is nighttime in a big city.  

Stopping in front of a wall covered in paintings of trees, he pushes on the wall. But to get out of the room, a foot-long metal rod shoots out of his index finger. With the metal rod he turns a key set into the wall and a section of it opens, admitting him to a stairway that leads to the balcony of a smoke-filled movie theater.

Clearly, this is a (French) film where anything can happen and everything means something other than what it appears to be. In the next scene Oscar is dressed like a responsible business executive in the morning sunshine, walking out of a modern apartment building, saying goodbye to his children and getting into the back of an especially long white limousine.

Structurally, Oscar always steps out of and always returns to the far end of this stretch limo for his next task. He is the only occupant.  The limo contains costumes and a fully stocked dressing table. His uniformed driver is the crisply attentive Celine (Edith Scob).

Through a single day and evening of employment Oscar accepts every assignment without question, occasionally taking additional orders from an unseen supervisor. His costumes include being a hunched over old beggar woman, an accordionist leading a marching band of accordionists, a ruthless assassin and a long sequence as despicable Monsieur Merde (said to be a favorite character of Carax).

There are several additional roles, none of them explained or ever seeming connected to the others. We do learn that it is nearly midnight when the film nears its end, as his limo returns with a dozen more identical white limos to a large industrial building fronted by the sign Holy Motors.

That’s when we meet Kylie Minogue, in a different limo, who has apparently the same job. She also has a complicated history with Oscar, giving the ending a bittersweet note of rue. Even if the story line flaunts its abstractness, the cigarette smoke and rue will be always French.