'Holy Motors'

Leos Carax's first feature in thirteen years has been long awaited by critics and world cinema lovers all over the world and what a cinematic ride it was. From the moment the lights went out, this film managed to grip the audience in a way the likes of which I have, so far, not experienced. If you are only seeing one film this year, make it this one.

A plot is a plot is a plot is, em, not a plot. Denis Levant plays no less than eleven different roles all combined within the overall character of Monsieur Oscar, a professional, well, let's just say, a professional full stop. He is driven through an barely recognisable version of Paris, an urban Metropolis, by his suave driver Céline. Is she real? Is she a robot? An alien? An air plane? The audience is told that he has nine 'appointments' that day. Starting off as a beggar woman, Monsieur Oscar then moves on to portray a series of characters which the so-called upstanding members of civilised society would, more often than not, like to ignore, from a Quasimodo-like imp-man, to a weirdly sexualised human machine, to a murderer, to a passive aggressive father-figure. In between appointments, he drives around in a post-modern version of the river Styx ferry, with Céline an uncanny and ambiguous Charon, while the changing masks become emblematic of the eternally fragmented notion of human identity. There appears to be an all-pervading emptiness running through the film, it is the emptiness at the core of our times in which the only reality available to modern being is a mediated one. As such, it comes as no surprise that Oscar is an actor, everything is a performance, even death, the other predominant image of the film. With each performance, life seems to be draining from Oscar and brings him always a step closer to Death, which is not so much a terrifying possibility as a welcomed relief. The only thing that keeps him going is the beauty of the gesture. The notion of beauty is the only thing that cannot be negated in the film, and, indeed in post-moderntiy, in which a mediated copy of experience might be devoid of a traditional core of reality, but is infused with beauty nonetheless.

Who is this cruel spectator, this inhuman consumer, spurring Oscar on to perform ever more deviant tasks for, what we can assume, pure entertainment value? It's not a far stretch to imagine it being us, the cinema audience from the mirror shot in the beginning in which Carax himself is observed by us observing a cinema audience. Could there be a more revealing image of consuming a mediated reality?

Carax does allow for moments of dark humour, such as the sequence in which Monsieur Merde jumps over tombstones bearing the inscription: 'Visitez le site' or 'visit the website'. Nowadays media promotion does not halt before death.

It is only when the spectator gives up the desire for coherent narrative that the film unfolds its true power. This is, indeed, the beauty of the gesture, as Carax takes pure delight in the human body and the very physicality of it. There's beauty or at least fascination in repulsion. Carax plays with the spectatorial senses, quite often, through the means of visual shock and thus blurs the boundaries of pre-conceived notions of beauty and ugliness as the latter can be found in the former and vice versa. He makes us question any 'natural' reactions we might have in stripping away the mantle of socially constructed vision. He lays bare a raw concept of humanity which is as characterised by a rough animalism as it is by almost ethereal beauty.

All the while, Carax plays with textures which range from the sleek smoothness of the limousine and the machine in general to the rough in, for example, the dirty fingernails of Monsieur Merde. Carax is of the opinion that everything belongs in film, just as everything just is, in life and in this, Holy Motors becomes near all-encompassing.

Casting the queen of pop, Kylie Minogue, as the long lost love proves a stroke of genius. In a beautiful musical pastiche, Minogue resembles Jean Seberg in an almost uncanny way, naturally, emphasised by the fact that Carax names her Jean. There is something sublime in this sequence. The post-modern self-reflexivity of this sequence only enhances the beauty of the gesture and the melancholia culminates in a death which is almost poetic in its performance.

I don't even know how to begin talking about Denis Lavant. This is what Daniel Day Lewis wishes he could do! Lavant doesn't portray characters, he becomes them. The control and precision Lavant has over his physicality can only be found in dancers in their meticulous striving for perfection. Innocence, tenderness, brutality, maliciousness, love, Lavant goes through the whole spectrum of human emotional capability and manages never to succumb to banality. He uses his body like a contortionist. Expression through gestures can quite often seem contrived and unnatural. Lavant, however, infuses the roles with life. If this isn't the performance of the decade, I don't know what is.

Ironically, in light of the theme of mediated reality and post-modern pastiche conveyed by the film, critics, in their eternal desire to compare and link, likened Holy Motors to Mulholland Drive. Whenever a film opens which celebrates the narrative nonsensical, poor Lynch must again function as a critical tool. Of course, Holy Motors strives through its filmic references, from its gleeful incorporation of the musical genre, to its keeping-alive of the nouvelle Vague tradition. It even incorporates elements of music video aesthetics. These visual references are woven together to, literally, paint a picture of a mind living in the cultural confusion of an eternally simulacrum-experience. So, let's leave poor Lynch alone, he's probably still busy finding the key to that damned box anyway.

The best thing about Holy Motors is its very existence, meaning the fact that cinema on this artistic scale is still being made. This cinematic experience can be likened to a visit in a turn-of-the-century circus; an eclectic, sensual and bodily journey before the notion of ugliness became the one social taboo. Holy Motors is a feast for the eyes, an assault on the senses. It's strange, it's weird, it's wonderful...it's cinema.