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Film

Holy Moly, 'Holy Motors'

Catch this moving, mournful, joyful film as it rips through Vancity and feel so alive!

Dorothy Woodend 16 Nov 2012TheTyee.ca

Dorothy Woodend writes about film for The Tyee every other Friday.

It's easy to become cynical in this modern age of ours. We eat and drink corruption on a daily basis, like dry toast and runny eggs. If you watch a lot of mainstream film, double this level of bile, and add a side of weary despair.

But just as you have resigned yourself to the breakfast special, along comes something that forces you to put down the fork, stop shoveling in the cheap eats, and realize that magic can still happen. It rolls in on electric wheels, grand, unstoppable, a great white beast, a rare creature that slides through the Paris night, brimming with mystery. Behind its smoked glass windows what secrets are transported?  

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Leos Carax's film Holy Motors.

The film closed the Vancouver International Film Festival this year, and it's easy to see why it was chosen. It is a world inside a film, or perhaps vice versa.

Motors caused a minor ruckus at the Cannes Festival this past spring. Some folks saw it and said, "That was terrific!" Others leapt to their feet and cried, "What the hell?"

Both are right. And that's the way it should be. It is a generous film, big enough to roll around in and yet built on a human scale, not unlike the big white limo at its centre. Even the critics seemed uncertain how best to react. In The New Yorker, David Denby, who I do not particularly trust, gave it a limp review, but a rejoinder came from his fellow critic Anthony Lane. Buried inside a review of Cloud Atlas, the fine Lane wrote of Holy Motors, "I was stirred beyond reason by Carax's notion that we might invest ourselves, plunging up to the hilt, in all that life and death demands of us, even though -- or precisely because -- we must feign those very feelings and move on."

I knew exactly what he meant, and "move" is perhaps the key word in his opining, since that is what the film does. It motors on from place to place, scene to scene, each moment fully immersive and encompassing. Such is life. I do not mean that in a glib fashion. This is a film about film, an elegy for the corporeal glory of celluloid replaced largely by the cool blue digital age, but more importantly it is about how life moves us from place to place. In each new role we must play a part, be it a beggar woman, a dying billionaire, an assassin or a monkey's husband. All the world is a stage to be sure, but it is the prepping between roles, the behind-the-scenes action, wiping away the makeup, taking off the wig and the false nose, and showing our bare, sad faces where we are our truest selves. Life is exhausting, it uses you up, all the dramas, the lost loves, the children grown and gone, and always the constant leaving things behind. Moving in only one direction wears a body out after a while.

If you want to experience this first hand, try visiting an old neighbourhood, a place where you once lived, took your kids to the park, cooked and ate dinner. The ghosts of the past cling hard to certain places, and they endure long after the people themselves are gone. "I'm not ready, not ready yet," you might think, but times moves on and takes you with it. A similar mourning clings to Holy Motors, but does not overwhelm the action. Ultimately, things keep on trucking.

And so, back to the film...

Holy life

Things kick off in a movie theatre where an audience is sitting in a darkened cavern, applauding the action in front of them. A man (the director himself) awakens in a bedroom, and pushes his way through a wallpaper forest of Aspen trees, thanks in part to a strange key-like appendage attached to his finger. He finds himself inside in the same theatre, where a huge dog wanders down the aisle. At this point in the narrative a section of my brain sat up, rubbed the sleep out of its eyes and piped up, "Holy Moly!" We are in Lynch/Buñuel/Godard Land, where everything is strange and grand.

The film is principally concerned with the adventures of one Monsieur Oscar. Oscar is played by the filmmaker's longtime collaborator Denis Lavant, a marvel of a performer possessed of a pitted knobby head, a sizeable penis, and an acrobat's body made of sinew and gristle. He is a particularly fine example of that French phenomenon Jolie-laide (pretty ugly).  

One fine morning, Oscar leaves his walled modern mansion, waved gaily off by his kids, and is driven to the centre of Paris where he takes on a series of personae, each incarnation helpfully delineated in a folder on the seat beside him. Shepherded by his loyal driver Céline (Édith Scob), Oscar travels through the city in a long white limousine, becoming variously a murderous bald-headed thug, a disappointed father, a long-lost lover, and most curiously a rabid, flower-gobbling goblin dressed in a natty green suit who kidnaps a model and descends into the bowels of Paris. Instead of defiling said beauty, something altogether stranger takes place. Even Kylie Minogue shows up, warbles a tune and takes a swan dive off La Samaritaine. How can you not love a film like that?

Just as you're wrapping your brain around each episode, things move on. The next act is about to begin, and like any good thespian Monsieur Oscar knows that preparation is key. Costumes must be changed, and the right cadence for dialogue hammered down. But each role takes away something, a slow soul-stealing crumble that leaves our hero at the end of these multiple characters asking, "Who am I really?"

In an interview with the New York Times, the filmmaker alluded to the ephemeral nature of celluloid, a flickering, time-based medium that carries experiences like a pair of cupped hands. Carax stated: "The film speaks the language of cinema, but it's not a film about cinema," he said. "I created a world -- not our world exactly but not that far, either -- and I tried to show the experience of being alive in this world."

It is this thing -- being alive in the world -- that is precisely what Holy Motors achieves. If that isn't magic, I don’t know what is.

Creation's joy

The thing that stayed with me long after the lights came up was the joy of creation, the rapture of prosody, of invention running riot for the sheer pleasure of doing so. The reason we humans busily make things, be it films, books, kids or casseroles is for the wonder of making something that wasn't there before. The Godlike act of making things most often results in lumpy, off-centre creations, but occasionally grace and good fortune come together. 

It occurred to me the other day to wonder whether children daydreamed any more. In an age when every moment is seemingly taken up by buzzing, beeping machines, is there a time and place for extended periods of fantasy? When I was a child, daydreaming took place during long car trips. It was a time when your dreaming mind could wander freely. While the world streamed by outside in dappled ribbons, your brain had time to spin endless fantasia of romance, revenge, high drama, all the made-up stuff that makes life more interesting.

I felt this dreaming mind return while watching Holy Motors. There is richness and generosity in this film, an abundance of ideas, emotion and incident, but most importantly there is joy. The joy that comes from not knowing where you are going, but simply being happy that you’re along for the ride. 

The film returns to the Vancity Theatre in Vancouver on Friday, Nov. 16, and if you need your faith -- and more importantly your appetite for film -- restored, buy a ticket and free your mind, so that the rest of you may follow.  [Tyee]

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