Art’s boundary from reality requires the security of semi-automatic weapons and allows art to take life. Director Leos Carax’s Holy Motors insists ideas like this while making a tribute to cinema.
We see one day of Monsieur Oscar’s (Denis Lavant) work split into nine vignettes, in which he performs highly stylized characters in the context of real life. Each vignette is an acting appointment, and the thin blond older Cherie chauffeurs Monsieur Oscar around Paris in a long white limousine.
On the surface level the references to film and theater are a tribute, but Carax comments on the relationship between art and life with a meaningful approach that encourages more introspection than a documentary or a traditional narrative could allow. The immortal Monsieur Oscar’s characters often perform violent or hurtful actions, which is a direct metaphor for art’s influence on the world.
What is Carax trying to say when he makes an actor kill a man who has no art about him? When a Godzilla-esque Irishman terrorizes a cemetery? When a father punishes a daughter for not being popular? The influence of the art, the drama, the actor, on reality is real and negative in this film. Each vignette is an ode to the destruction of life caused by the art forms. Even the interacte seems sacrilegious: a loud prog band led by accordions walk through a chapel playing loud music.
Carax uses interactions between Monsieur Oscar and real people to convey the relationship between art and life, but he also uses more subtle devices. The cemetery in which the red-bearded terror wreaks havoc to the soundtrack of Godzilla contains gravestones with captions pointing people to their website. The commentary here pertains to the immortality that art is supposed to give, and the tacky nature of a website on gravestones also jabs at the place of technology in society. We see the highest achievement in technology in a scene where Monsieur Oscar performs an array of fight stunts in a motion-capture suit, and finally participates in a weird sexual encounter with an unbelievably flexible woman in a similar suit. We see their encounter in suits as well as morphed into their intended forms: alien-like creatures with extra tentacles writhing around. So, the most advanced technology is paired with vile alien sex.
Little windows into Monsieur Oscar’s actual wishes and experiences shed light onto what Carax may value. There is a scene where he asks Cherie if he has an appointment in the woods today, because he misses nature. The closest the actor comes to green space is the cemetery, where his crazed leprechaun character tramples on the dead and ravages the flowers laying on their gravestones. Besides this, he is in buildings, and parking garages, and cars.
Another interesting insight into Monsieur Oscar’s character is his deterioration as the journey wears on. At one point, the boss man who dictates the appointments comments on how tired Monsieur Oscar seems lately. The actor also doesn’t eat the entire film, to the dismay of Cherie.
The setting moves to different locations around Paris with each scene, but the limousine is the place that Monsieur Oscar returns to after each appointment. It contains his costumes, makeup, and schedule for the day. This dressing room acts as a reference to film and drama and the place where an actor mentally prepares for the role he is to play.
A skewed reality is contained in the limousine, and if we take the title of the movie as an indication of his status, we can interpret the immortality and control Monsieur Oscar has during his journey through the day as a parallel to God. With life and death at his fingertips, and immortality on his side, what does this mean for Monsieur Oscar as an actor? That the power of art, of music, of drama has a power that is comparable to the almighty man in the sky?
These questions are the ones that Carax instigates.
Directed by Leos Carax
Starring Denis Lavant, Kylie Minogue, Eva Mendes
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