Holy Motors
A Film By Leos Carax
France
The
first shot in Leos Carax’s Holy Motors,
besides the brief images of motion studies by Étienne-Jules Marey that pre-date
cinema’s existence, is of an audience. They are mute, silent, perhaps asleep,
perhaps dead, as a film unfolds before them. It’s hard not to read such as a
provocative image as a comment about the state of cinema, especially as Carax
himself awakes behind the theater in a small room, staring out toward the frame
of reality, the window, ignoring the digital one, the computer, before peering
at the audience below from the balcony. The easy suggestion would follow then
that the film that follows is going to be one that wakes the audience, and thus
saves cinema. But he doesn’t believe he can awake this audience—this is a film
as much more about “Fin de Cinema” than it is about how to save them, less a
love letter than a “fuck you” to it.
Holy Motors was the runaway success of
the Cannes Film Festival, receiving no awards but certainly one of the most
praised, most talked about films. The first feature film by Carax since 1999’s Pola X, it’s a film about many things,
mostly Carax’s own contradictory relationship to cinema. It’s filled with wild,
bizarre imagery meant to shock into laughter, sometimes delight. But its
depressive attitude toward cinema, even among its “wild and crazy” sequences,
seems juvenile at best, and its schematic structure never makes the imaginative
leap. Every time Carax might reach for something transcendent, he feels
content, no, compelled to undercut himself and hold us back. Some of that is
certainly by design, but it makes the film feel false. The more I knew what Holy Motors was, the less I found myself
enjoying it.
