Holy Motors

As hackneyed as it sounds, the less you know when it comes to Holy Motors, the better. Leos Carax’s fifth feature-length film is a bizarre experience, and one which is difficult to sum up in simple terms. It’s an entrancing journey both audacious and fractured, with its fantastical premise given a darkly comical Lynchian twist.

We follow the aloof Monsieur Oscar (Denis Lavant) as he is driven around Paris in a stretch limo, stopping off at nine appointments over the course of one day. For each ‘appointment’, Monsieur Oscar dons a different disguise, and in turn, a different identity. As the film unfolds, his activities range from deeds as simple as escorting a child from a party to kidnapping a fashion model, his behaviour during these tasks lurching from serene to startlingly violent (keep those fingers clenched). Along the way, he questions the consequences of his actions on both himself and others, and encounters a fellow limo passenger (Kylie Minogue) as the day draws to a close.

Holy Motors has predominantly been viewed as a treatise on cinema itself (with particular regard to performativity), but it’s a film rich in its potential for possible interpretations. Mercifully, though, it never falls into existentialist sludge. Carax keeps a playful sense of self-awareness beneath the eccentric exterior, and Lavant turns in a remarkable central performance, imbuing his antics with both livewire fervour and a delicate sense of pathos.

Carax is never more engaging than when keeping his audience on an ambivalent knife-edge: the pace is so deliberate and the action so unpredictable that you’ll never know whether to laugh at its absurdity or shiver in discomfort. Even if you’re not big on art-house cinema, Holy Motors is definitely a trip worth taking, and it stands out as of the most peculiar and provocative films of the year.

Michael Perry