Recent Film: Holy Motors

Holy Motors (2012), dir. Leos Carax

When gaudior is out of town, I spend a lot of time with jinian and sovay (I mean, more than the lot of time I do usually), and I also spend a lot of time poking at Netflix. Netflix appears to have realized that the way to my heart, specifically, is to acquire recent-ish festival-circuit movies that I did not manage to see. (It's probably also reasonably cheap for them.) I tried to see Holy Motors when it came out, at the Harvard Film Archive, but the director was there in person, and I have never seen such a line at a movie theatre anywhere in this town at all, let alone at the HFA, which is genteelly unaccustomed to the concept of 'line'. So I finally got around to it this past Friday night, and I have been struggling to articulate the experience ever since.

This is pretty much the standard critical reaction. Everyone agrees that it's a really good movie, but beyond that, things become more difficult. I mean, the Guardian apparently called it 'a splendid furry teacup of a film', if that gives you an idea. Over email I have compared it with the Golux's hat. If I have to pick vaguely describable things to compare it to, it's probably as close as we'll get to a film of Tanith Lee's The Silver Metal Lover, despite having no plot, character, or setting elements in common. I also suspect a chunk of it of being an unfaithful adaptation of Michael Cisco's novel The Great Lover, which, if you have not read it, is one of the most resolutely anti-narrative books ever written for most of its length.

Fortunately, I was lucky in that I got what I believe to be the correct connotations from the title, which helped exceedingly. I heard 'holy motors' and thought, what concepts of that sort are floating around in the world, and then I thought of the mythological blood engines, the continuous sacrifices necessary to keep the entire Aztec cosmology working. Those are holy motors, and they demand food. In the movie, the motors are the same and the sacrifice is similar, but the system that is being served is cinema, the entire apparatus of movies and those who make them and those who view them.

I was also lucky in that one of my strongest associations with the word 'saint' comes from John Crowley's novel Engine Summer (cf. my username), in which a saint is "someone who lives many lives between birth and dying". I haven't asked Crowley if he had film in mind at all when he came up with this, though I would be fascinated to know, but that complicated and multivalent definition, which has in its novel of origin so many meanings that I don't want to go into it, is also certainly true of those actors we call 'the saints of the cinema'. Many lives, many births, many loves, many deaths. So I was able to recognize the main character of Holy Motors as a saint, cinematic variant, fairly easily, which made wrapping my mind around the movie a much faster process.

The basic conceit of Holy Motors is that its principal actor (Denis Lavant, stunning) spends a day traveling through Paris in a large white limousine, being chauffeured to what he refers to as appointments. For each appointment he wears a different costume, and each one is literally a chunk of a life, which he lives out until it's time to get back into the limousine. Through various conversations he has with his chauffeur (Edith Scob, majestic) and other people around, it eventually becomes clear that this is set far enough in the future for cameras to have become basically nano-drones, and in this way the actor is participating in the making of multiple movies at the same time. In some, he is important, in at least one the protagonist, in at least one the villain, in several minor bystanding characters. He dies in a couple, by violence or otherwise, and because this is cinema it looks perfectly real, until the bodies all stand up again.

Two things become clear over time, and the interplay of these things is the principal emotional arc of the movie: one, we are not going to get to see his 'real life'. He has no 'real life'. Going from appointment to appointment like this is how he spends at least eighteen hours a day, every day. These are his real lives. They're scripted, of course, because movies are scripted-- and one thing I love is that the different appointments have different levels of quality in the scripts; one of them is such an embarrassingly cliched soap-opera weepie that it's only the fact that it's his real life that makes Lavant's lines even mildly sayable-- but he spends the hours living in each of them, and each of them is truly a part of him. He seems exhausted by this, but it's hard to tell, because, two: because the interludes inside the limousine, in which he is supposedly not acting, are being shown on film, to an audience (me) which is watching it, those cannot, if you think about it, possibly be unscripted either. I mean they are doubly scripted, they are scripted in the world of the movie as well as in our world. So he has an entire emotional arc with his chauffeur, and an interlude that is supposed to play as unscripted time in which he sneaks off and has an emotional chat with another actor, and I sat there fiercely doubting that that could actually be happening until suddenly there was a grand sweeping musical number and I realized the whole thing had to be an easter-egg for the people (like me) who are following the actor instead of watching any one of the movies he's making. This film puts the viewer firmly in the exact place of its projected SFnal audience, which I think is spiffy.

The other way it puts the viewer in the place of its projected SFnal audience is that none of what I just said above is explained at all in-text. You just watch it. You have to assemble it piecemeal entirely from incluing. It took me most of the film's two-hour running time to be certain of my hypotheses, and there was a stretch of at least a half hour in the center where I sat there thinking 'I have no idea what is going on here, but I am really enjoying this movie'. I can't recall the last time I had that particular experience. Usually not knowing what is going on bothers me.

However, what makes the film work, and the only reason it can work at all, is that each individual movie scene is so good. I would cheerfully watch any of the larger films. Even the ones that obviously suck do so very entertainingly. They are visually stunning and unique, brilliantly acted, and extremely engrossing. Denis Lavant's actor is chameleonic, fading into each part while still maintaining a startling degree of charisma and almost forcing a sense of empathy with each of his characters. (It is also astonishing how much emotional charge each scene gains from being a documentary of his real and lived life, and how much that works to produce an emotional charge even though it is only true in-universe... I hope someone has written a dissertation on this movie's layers of meta-fiction.) I would have found Holy Motors just as entertaining, though I probably wouldn't admire and respect it this much, if I'd never been able to put together the intellectual web of it. Given that Leos Carax has said that it started as a compilation project of a chunk of every feature film idea he's never been able to get the money to do, I am impressed that either he doesn't have dud ideas or he has successfully managed to weed out the portions of these projects that do not work. And he's thrown them all at the screen in a brilliant, charming, and actively joyous jigsaw-puzzle Golux's hat of a movie, and the question I came away with is: if this is how we wind up feeding those holy motors, would it still be worth it? Denis Lavant's character is living in his own private utopia and dystopia, at the exact same time. Every emotion is curated for maximum effect, every single aspect of his life designed for maximum artistic gorgeousness. But how many people have ever really wanted to trade places with one of the saints?

Recent Film: Holy Motors

Holy Motors (2012), dir. Leos Carax

When gaudior is out of town, I spend a lot of time with jinian and sovay (I mean, more than the lot of time I do usually), and I also spend a lot of time poking at Netflix. Netflix appears to have realized that the way to my heart, specifically, is to acquire recent-ish festival-circuit movies that I did not manage to see. (It's probably also reasonably cheap for them.) I tried to see Holy Motors when it came out, at the Harvard Film Archive, but the director was there in person, and I have never seen such a line at a movie theatre anywhere in this town at all, let alone at the HFA, which is genteelly unaccustomed to the concept of 'line'. So I finally got around to it this past Friday night, and I have been struggling to articulate the experience ever since.

This is pretty much the standard critical reaction. Everyone agrees that it's a really good movie, but beyond that, things become more difficult. I mean, the Guardian apparently called it 'a splendid furry teacup of a film', if that gives you an idea. Over email I have compared it with the Golux's hat. If I have to pick vaguely describable things to compare it to, it's probably as close as we'll get to a film of Tanith Lee's The Silver Metal Lover, despite having no plot, character, or setting elements in common. I also suspect a chunk of it of being an unfaithful adaptation of Michael Cisco's novel The Great Lover, which, if you have not read it, is one of the most resolutely anti-narrative books ever written for most of its length.

Fortunately, I was lucky in that I got what I believe to be the correct connotations from the title, which helped exceedingly. I heard 'holy motors' and thought, what concepts of that sort are floating around in the world, and then I thought of the mythological blood engines, the continuous sacrifices necessary to keep the entire Aztec cosmology working. Those are holy motors, and they demand food. In the movie, the motors are the same and the sacrifice is similar, but the system that is being served is cinema, the entire apparatus of movies and those who make them and those who view them.

I was also lucky in that one of my strongest associations with the word 'saint' comes from John Crowley's novel Engine Summer (cf. my username), in which a saint is "someone who lives many lives between birth and dying". I haven't asked Crowley if he had film in mind at all when he came up with this, though I would be fascinated to know, but that complicated and multivalent definition, which has in its novel of origin so many meanings that I don't want to go into it, is also certainly true of those actors we call 'the saints of the cinema'. Many lives, many births, many loves, many deaths. So I was able to recognize the main character of Holy Motors as a saint, cinematic variant, fairly easily, which made wrapping my mind around the movie a much faster process.

The basic conceit of Holy Motors is that its principal actor (Denis Lavant, stunning) spends a day traveling through Paris in a large white limousine, being chauffeured to what he refers to as appointments. For each appointment he wears a different costume, and each one is literally a chunk of a life, which he lives out until it's time to get back into the limousine. Through various conversations he has with his chauffeur (Edith Scob, majestic) and other people around, it eventually becomes clear that this is set far enough in the future for cameras to have become basically nano-drones, and in this way the actor is participating in the making of multiple movies at the same time. In some, he is important, in at least one the protagonist, in at least one the villain, in several minor bystanding characters. He dies in a couple, by violence or otherwise, and because this is cinema it looks perfectly real, until the bodies all stand up again.

Two things become clear over time, and the interplay of these things is the principal emotional arc of the movie: one, we are not going to get to see his 'real life'. He has no 'real life'. Going from appointment to appointment like this is how he spends at least eighteen hours a day, every day. These are his real lives. They're scripted, of course, because movies are scripted-- and one thing I love is that the different appointments have different levels of quality in the scripts; one of them is such an embarrassingly cliched soap-opera weepie that it's only the fact that it's his real life that makes Lavant's lines even mildly sayable-- but he spends the hours living in each of them, and each of them is truly a part of him. He seems exhausted by this, but it's hard to tell, because, two: because the interludes inside the limousine, in which he is supposedly not acting, are being shown on film, to an audience (me) which is watching it, those cannot, if you think about it, possibly be unscripted either. I mean they are doubly scripted, they are scripted in the world of the movie as well as in our world. So he has an entire emotional arc with his chauffeur, and an interlude that is supposed to play as unscripted time in which he sneaks off and has an emotional chat with another actor, and I sat there fiercely doubting that that could actually be happening until suddenly there was a grand sweeping musical number and I realized the whole thing had to be an easter-egg for the people (like me) who are following the actor instead of watching any one of the movies he's making. This film puts the viewer firmly in the exact place of its projected SFnal audience, which I think is spiffy.

The other way it puts the viewer in the place of its projected SFnal audience is that none of what I just said above is explained at all in-text. You just watch it. You have to assemble it piecemeal entirely from incluing. It took me most of the film's two-hour running time to be certain of my hypotheses, and there was a stretch of at least a half hour in the center where I sat there thinking 'I have no idea what is going on here, but I am really enjoying this movie'. I can't recall the last time I had that particular experience. Usually not knowing what is going on bothers me.

However, what makes the film work, and the only reason it can work at all, is that each individual movie scene is so good. I would cheerfully watch any of the larger films. Even the ones that obviously suck do so very entertainingly. They are visually stunning and unique, brilliantly acted, and extremely engrossing. Denis Lavant's actor is chameleonic, fading into each part while still maintaining a startling degree of charisma and almost forcing a sense of empathy with each of his characters. (It is also astonishing how much emotional charge each scene gains from being a documentary of his real and lived life, and how much that works to produce an emotional charge even though it is only true in-universe... I hope someone has written a dissertation on this movie's layers of meta-fiction.) I would have found Holy Motors just as entertaining, though I probably wouldn't admire and respect it this much, if I'd never been able to put together the intellectual web of it. Given that Leos Carax has said that it started as a compilation project of a chunk of every feature film idea he's never been able to get the money to do, I am impressed that either he doesn't have dud ideas or he has successfully managed to weed out the portions of these projects that do not work. And he's thrown them all at the screen in a brilliant, charming, and actively joyous jigsaw-puzzle Golux's hat of a movie, and the question I came away with is: if this is how we wind up feeding those holy motors, would it still be worth it? Denis Lavant's character is living in his own private utopia and dystopia, at the exact same time. Every emotion is curated for maximum effect, every single aspect of his life designed for maximum artistic gorgeousness. But how many people have ever really wanted to trade places with one of the saints?

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