CIFF Review: Holy Motors

There’s a photographer in “Holy Motors” shooting pictures rapidly and blindly of a lifeless model dressed in gold as played by Eva Mendes. “Beauty! Beauty! Beauty,” he says in complete cartoonish astonishment.

At that moment, a hideous man dressed in a green leprechaun’s suit and no undershirt pushes his way to the front of the crowd and stands silently biting his decrepit fingernails. The man has long red hair plastered to the side of his head and speaks only gibberish. He’s made a scene.

The photographer turns to him and starts shooting photos of him. “Weird, weird. Weird!”

Is this how one should watch “Holy Motors,” the absurdist French drama by the cult French director Leos Carax? It premiered at the Cannes Film Festival this year and wowed audiences by being completely nutzo and was heralded as an underappreciated cult film because this year’s particular jury led by Nanni Moretti couldn’t possibly “get it.”

I saw it in a sold out screening at the Chicago International Film Festival Sunday night, where it was received by an audience that was half stunned and confused and half ecstatic.

I found myself in neither crowd, frustrated by this repugnant mishmash of a film that either has no point or all too much of one. If you’re going to make a surrealist masterpiece, my advice would be to not be disingenuous about it.

Luis Bunuel or David Lynch Carax is not, try as he might to put his star in a wig that shares the bizarre Lynchian swoosh. He’s made a film that revels in its own spontaneous style, modeling its half-baked ideas and genre spoofs only for us to gawk. The result is a series of avant-garde and art house shorts that have no commonalities, with the exception that its hero seems to smoke in every one. For every moment of “Holy Motors” that is tearful, erotic, giddy, suspenseful or chilling, Carax almost always has a way of ending each with a cheap visual gag. For all its visual flair and profundity, these segments resound as little more than stylized forgeries.

The film does not have a conventional narrative, if any at all, but it does have a protagonist, Monsieur Oscar (Denis Lavant). We first see him walking out of a mansion and into a limo where he is followed by bodyguards in black sedans. His driver, Celine (Edith Scob), informs him he has nine appointments today.

In preparation for these, he dons wigs, face putty and makeup in front of a brightly lit dressing room mirror. When he steps out of the car, he has made a complete transformation into another person.

First we see him as a hobbled street beggar, unrecognizable and hopeless. Next he dons a black motion capture suit and performs martial arts for a dark, empty room full of infrared lasers. A tall, slender, faceless woman walks out and is bathed in red by the lights, and the two slide across each other’s bodies in sexual acrobatics. The resulting animation is two snake-like monsters having sex. In another segment we meet the leprechaun, who kidnaps Eva Mendes and takes her to a cave, gouges at flowers and her hair, tears her clothes to make a gold burka, then strips down himself to reveal a full on boner and falls asleep to the sound of her lullaby.

Now after all this, is there any part of you that could believe a segment with Oscar picking up his daughter from a party and driving her home in disappointment could be considered genuine?

Don’t all these dramatic segments, like when he’s talking to his daughter on his death bed, or when he’s dragging himself helpless to the limo after being stabbed in the neck, feel like a lie? Maybe all movies are kind of a lie, which leads to what I think “Holy Motors” is actually about.

Now, let me preface this analysis by saying that “Holy Motors” may not be about anything. If watching Bunuel has taught me anything, it’s that two images back to back might not have anything to do with the other, and that anyone tying their brains into a pretzel to figure it out is either embarrassing themselves or projecting.

What I gathered is that this is a movie about performances. It’s about cinema and actors, and Denis Lavant should be applauded for tackling and embodying so many roles so convincingly. Here we have a guy who is such a method actor that for a moment he quite literally becomes someone else. If he were the same person when he got in and out of that limo, then each appointment would be impacted by the one that came before it. He’d be tired, if not dead several times over.

But that’s a plot analysis. The film’s opening shot is of a darkened movie theater audience, acting almost as a mirror looking back at us. This immediately makes us consider our own voyeurism and establishes the implication that it’s all a movie where anything can happen. Carax also includes glimpses of footage from the birth of cinema, like a naked man stretching or a hand clapping, to reference a time when the camera was so omnipresent that actors were aware of their performance, enabling them to embody anything on screen because there was no clear definition for what cinema was.

There are more subtle hints as well. One segment references names like Theo and Vogan, both of which are used in earlier appointments, suggesting that Oscar is an actor who has past traits seep in to his work. Each segment also seems to reference a particular genre, be it character drama, melodrama, gangster, art house or musical.

Maybe I’ve unlocked the film’s riddles and its brilliance, but it doesn’t excuse quite a lot. It doesn’t excuse the fact that it’s a mean spirited movie where violence and sex seem to occur without reason. It doesn’t lend for future viewing where more details can be unlocked because certain moments like the accordion ensemble, Celine’s green mask or the film’s final shot, are nothing more than one-off absurdist jokes, if not just Easter eggs. And it neglects the fact that directors like Bunuel and Lynch have a much stronger control over the tone of the audience. You know if you’re being duped, you know if a moment is supposed to be heartbreaking or beautiful and you know how you feel even if you don’t know what you’re seeing.

Carax’s film misses these marks. It often puts more exotic things on screen than actually compose them in a dynamic way, and Lavant’s performances should not be overstated because the film doesn’t give us much of a base ground from which to gauge his transformation.

I think claims that Carax’s film will be remembered as a classic years from now are exaggerated. It’s a movie that stands out only for its weirdness and little else.

1 ½ stars

Summer Hours

When you walk through a museum and see an ornate piece of furniture on display, you read the caption and walk past, forgetting about it as soon as it leaves your sight.

But consider that this desk, vase or armoire used to sit in someone’s home. It used to hold treasured belongings and tie up the room. It used to mean something to someone.

“Summer Hours” finds meaning in our possessions. It’s a film about a family attempting to split up their mother’s belongings after her passing, and it gets at the subtle nostalgia, plans, bonds and emotions that exist in every family.

This particular French family has gathered for their mother Helene’s (Edith Scob) 75th birthday. They talk quaintly and the children play, but Helene needs to talk business. She pulls aside her son Frederic (Charles Berling) to discuss what to do with her belongings after she dies. This is never an easy conversation topic.

The big problem is that Helene is a wealthy art collector living in a massive French villa. She had a deep friendship with a famous French artist long ago and acquired many of his paintings and valuables. Frederic is the only one still living in France and the only one equipped to truly maintain the house after she’s gone.

But how do you get someone to care about an older person’s relics? Frederic has enough problems with his own kids, and now he has to look over the estate of a French artist he hardly knew. Despite her massive collection, the saddest truth is that Helene can’t give away everything. “There are a lot of things that will leave with me,” she says. “There are stories no one is interested in and things no one wants.”

Shortly after, Helene dies, and the family gathers again to manage her estate. Jeremie (Jeremie Renier) is starting a new job in China and is short for cash, and Adrienne (Juliette Binoche) is getting married to her American boyfriend and living abroad. Neither has the time or money to keep the house or many of the treasured belongings, and Frederic can’t buy them out. Most of it must be sold or donated to museums that are interested.

It’s a fight between nostalgia and necessity, between past and present desires. Everyone has their own plans, and in such closely knit families, it can be difficult and awkward when they don’t meet.

Director and writer Olivier Assayas finds that awkward tension in everything that is not said. In one pivotal scene, Adrienne admits she’s getting married, but the news lands like a dull thud because it casts the deciding vote in selling the house. We can sense so easily that Frederic is biting his tongue out of respect, but at the same time he has to show his enthusiastic, happy support.

“Summer Hours” has an elegant, episodic quality to it that encourages these actors and stifles any melodrama. It finds authenticity and meaning in even the most simple of moments.

3 stars