Yeah, Carax's hilariously blase introduction was awesome. Definitely think he was pretty ticked off at how long it took to start.
And a hell yes to the raves for Lavant in this thread. What an astonishing performance/series of performances.
Yeah, Carax's hilariously blase introduction was awesome. Definitely think he was pretty ticked off at how long it took to start.
And a hell yes to the raves for Lavant in this thread. What an astonishing performance/series of performances.
His intro segued perfectly into the opening scene, sunglasses and all.
Made that even funnier.
And in the film-within-the-film in that scene, the shot of that girl looking through the ship's round window was breathtaking, with a great transition to this ship-like Tati-esque house in the suburbs.
T E A M R I V E T T E
Awesome to hear a handful of new viewers join the chorus of praise!
Originally Posted by haqyunus
This is one of the things that most impressed me and, beyond Lavant's performance, helped push the movie to such incredible heights for me. It's so passionately committed to each of the vignettes/roles/genres and so the homage to cinema feels adoringly authentic, a luscious love letter instead of a quickly dissipating joke. The alternative to what Carax and Lavant achieve is something more akin to a spoof movie, where various genres and situations are skewered satirically and sarcastically. But that's not what Holy Motors is like at all. When we get to the dying uncle in bed scene, it really is a dying uncle in bed scene with actual emotion that eventually concludes with a lightening of mood, some comedy, a removal from that particular cliche/genre. But what's unique is that the sequence actually lasts for several minutes and Carax challenges Lavant and the other actress in the scene to generate cinematic emotions within a scene that has a familiar situation, but "characters" we've essentially only just met. It's a bold move in a movie full of them and it's another that pays off beautifully.
The same goes for all the sequences, each with their own identity, genre, and cinematic corner of the imagination.
I've heard the Lynch comparisons, but I really don't get them at all. I actually think your Bunuel one makes a little more sense, even though the movie feels so unique and original to me that I'm not sure how necessary any such comparisons are. But the Lynch one confounds me. I think Lynch's work, especially Mulholland Dr. and Inland Empire, are far more difficult to interpret than Holy Motors, which isn't a knock against either movie. I love all three dearly, but I really struggled to make sense of Inland Empire, while I feel Holy Motors, while leaving lots open to interpretation, is pretty clearly about cinematic styles, genres, tones, techniques, and combining many of them to comment on the current state of the medium. That still leaves plenty to dig through and Holy Motors is never shallow, but Lynch's work tends to feel more challenging to me. I feel like this sounds like I'm picking sides, but not at all! I just think something like Inland Empire and Holy Motors are quite different, even though both play with the powerful pull of cinema and imaginative expression.
I also feel like Holy Motors is a more fun and playful movie than much of Lynch's work. There's definitely a melancholic quality to the movie, but it's very funny and so kaleidoscopic with its array of refreshingly adopted genres that it often feels drunk on the very possibilities and limitlessness of cinema. Lynch's work is the stuff of nightmares for me. Not in a bad way, but still in a terrifying way. Eraserhead is the scariest damn thing I've ever seen, and Lost Highway, Mulholland Dr., and Inland Empire all freak me out quite deeply. Robert Blake in Lost Highway may be the most horrifying face of evil in any movie I've ever seen. To me, in much of his work, Lynch operates within the surreal horror genre in ways unlike any other. The tone and mood that he can achieve is otherworldly, truly something I've only ever experienced otherwise in a dream.
Holy Motors and Lynch's movies both delve into the surreal, but I think differently. They're more perpendicular than parallel for me.
God, I absolutely loved this. Only half know what it was actually about, but that doesn't matter. It was a weird combination of Lynch, Buñuel and even Goddard. I don't remember seeing such a purely cinematic film in a long time. The Eva Mendes section was pure insanity; quite possibly one of the craziest sequences I've ever seen put on screen and the Kyle Minogue scene was so moving and beautiful. Denis Lavant gives a tour de force for the ages. Loved this.
I don't know, maybe it has been posted here already but this piece by Richard Brody in The New Yorker is quite interesting (and enlightening too, so beware as spoilers abound)
http://m.newyorker.com/online/blogs/...-reviewed.html
Woooooooow! I'm totally speechless, definitely my favorite of the yearI'll probably see it again tonight.
I know I've got a big ego, I really don't know why it's such a big deal, though.
That's funny, I actually got to speak briefly with Carax at the Holy Motors after party ( where he sat all by himself in a corner booth ), and for some reason I invoked the name of David Lynch when thanking Leos for his body of work. Funny thing is, I didn't get to actually see Holy Motors until a few days later, so these Lynch invocations are quite interesting.
While I was blown away by the originality of many individual Holy Motors scenes, unfortunately I don't think this in any way comes close to the heights of INLAND EMPIRE (which I've always said is a film that has pretty much ruined - in comparison - all other movies I've seen since). Both films are about the stages of reincarnation (the animal stage is always the giveaway for me ... rabbits in IE, chimapnzees in HM). Where Carax adds a new twist is by incorporating technology into the afterlife circle (especially with the limo's conversation at the end, and earlier with the CGI sequence), though I suppose one could argue that Kubrick already went there all the way back in 2001, A Space Odyssey. To me Holy Motors lacks the depth, the gravitas that made INLAND EMPIRE the amazing trip it was. HM was a bit too surface for me, though what an amazingly beautiful (and fun/funny) surface it was! For me the individual parts seemed better than the overall whole, though utterly original (and I loved it's use of GREEN)! I look forward to seeing it again, to delve deeper into it's after-life, reincarnation themes, and I fully expect my estimation to grow. Les Amants du Pont-Neuf remains my favorite Carax, and it was funny to see Lavant sport yet another prosthetic hard-on!
This actually would be a great double-feature with INLAND EMPIRE, though I'm not sure which would be the preferable order to view them. HM as the palate-cleansing refresher after the oh-so-heavy IE, or would the lighter film coming second seem even more inconsequential in comparison?!?
I saw this again, still don't entirely understand everything (with this film, I don't think you can ever). But I love it more and more. It is so ambitious, wacky and high energy I can't help to love it, even if I don't completely understand.
I found the Mr. Merde sequence didn't quite hold up for me on the second viewing, but I still love it. It is the most obviously wacky sequence in the whole film, but I think those qualities show up better on the first viewing (for me at least). It allowed me to focus more on the rich detail of some of the other sequences. This viewing I was just taken away with the sequence where M. Oscar plays the father picking his daughter up from the party. Lavant plays that scene so convincingly (not an exception). The anger at his daughter, which is internalized from his own insecurities plays off the rest of the film wonderfully.
Buster, you'd be pleased to know that I so far have not had the guts to re-watch INLAND EMPIRE for the very reasons you post. It's just too huge.
The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life.
The cinema is not an art which films
It’s easy to want to read this as a film about film—and it certainly is. That’s impossible to deny. Yet, perhaps because that angle was already so talked about, and given my own philosophical proclivities and the things I always babble on about, I was obviously more drawn to the way in which the film purposefully blurs the line between “cinema” and “life,” and to its very queer conceptions of identity. I’ve written a paper that attempts to articulate what “queer writing” might look like (as much as one can articulate an antilanguage), and one of the observations that I hold to is that anything that could be labeled “avant-garde” is, at its core, an example of “queer writing.” And this is because anything that is avant-garde in some way attempts to defy or confound interpretation. And “queerness” is not a post-identity (as McTeague and others so rightfully tease me about) but rather is a pre-identity. You see, we’re all queer—queerness is our natural state, as we exist before we are shackled by discourse and labels. The queer self exists before the very concept of identity, before ontology. And here is a movie that hints at just that.
something between art and life
Many have noted that Lavant’s colorful parade of characters can be read as a meditation on the art of acting, but only a handful critics have I seen take the next, and most important step: recognizing that “acting” is an art in which everybody takes part (since we are born into discourse, the closest we come to achieving our primal queer state is to stay one step ahead of discourse, by constantly evolving and mutating—by challenging the tyranny of the totalizing “I” and embracing our multiplicative selves). There is no one among us that is not an actor—and this fact is perhaps hinted at by the film itself, as Lavant’s character runs into several other individuals who seem to have the same profession he does, and by the preponderance of limos pulling into Holy Motors at night that perhaps during the day carry and deliver the same cargo. Clearly Lavant’s profession does not make him an outlier or anomaly, and it therefore becomes impossible to determine whether anyone in the film at all is “real.” Or rather, everyone is real, and each of the identities they assume is as real as the next.
The technological angle has also been much discussed, and I find the film fascinatingly ambiguous on this end. This film is not the rant of a luddite raging against the machine. The digital is far too beautiful for that. When Merde storms past a row of tombstones that urge people to visit the deceased’s website, we laugh, but it’s hard to tell how venomous this barb is. It seems more objectively observant than subjectively subversive. After all, in a world of Facebook and tumblr, we all already have websites, and those certainly have the potential to outlive us. Why couldn’t they stand as proper memorials? We’re as much binary code any more as we are flesh and blood. Why is a website more comical or less appropriate than a granite obelisk?
Certainly, the scene at the motion capture studio demonstrates Carax’s conflicted view: Oscar and the woman’s erotic dance transforms into the sublime and becomes the image of constellations writhing in ecstasy. However, when Carax reveals how the motion capture is being rendered, the result is something rather hellish (though even this image has a certain tension—it is as compelling [in its way] as it is repulsive). And this conflict over the embodiedness of our humanity is at the core of queer and posthuman discourse as well—on the one hand, because of the aesthetic, visceral pleasures the body affords, we consider it crucial to our identity and experiences, yet, our evolution past the human body, our cyborgification, our assimilation into the cyber-aether, offers us the sort of cosmic fluidity that we might desire. However, I don’t want to overdetermine these elements: Carax’s depiction of technology is multi-faceted, compelling, and quite funny, and deserves consideration removed from this particular line of reasoning.
life: the cinema
Instead, I’ll just overdetermine other elements of the film. Other moments hint at a longing for a more primal self: Carax awakens in an apartment or hotel room at the film’s start, and the wallpaper that hides the door to some sort of cinema-inner-sanctum is a mesmerizing pattern of trees—a forest. You don’t have to make any sort of giant symbolic or metaphorical leaps here. A return to nature. And once Carax enters the cinema, what approaches the screen? A couple canines and a baby. Animals and a human before it has language. The creatures are drawn toward the images, toward the screen blazing to life before them. Toward that which cannot be defined by language, but which can only be experienced. This beginning is recalled shortly into Oscar’s exploits when he asks Celine if he has any assignments in the forest—he misses working in the forest.
And at the film's end, what is Oscar’s final role? To go to a house in a developed complex and be the husband and father to a family of apes. A mix of the contemporary and the primordial. Literally: animals placed into the rigid confines of society.
Epilogue: Other merde
All of that is to say nothing of the raw emotion that each scene is able to achieve and sustain. And of the brilliant jokes spread throughout and wonderful allusions. Some other personal favorite touches of mine: Carax purposely recalling his own films (the Pont Alexandre III immediately recalling the Pont Neuf, Oscar’s run on the treadmill in front of the green screen recalling the famous and jubilant run of Lavant down the street in Mauvais Sang, and most obviously the reappearance of Merde).
Speaking of which: Merde’s first appearance was in the Tokyo! omnibus film, and so Carax’s use of Ifukube’s Godzilla score was totally appropriate. I loved seeing it resurrected along with the character, though, because Carax still so effortlessly channels the feeling of an old Toho monster flick in the beginning of that sequence: the cemetery, with its countless mausoleums and such actually takes on the appearance of the miniaturized model cities that men in costume would rampage around and destroy—and much the same happens in this vignette.
I also loved how Oscar had to enter the motion capture studio: the door unlocks when it recognizes his nose hair. Such a brilliant little satire of the sort of fingerprint and retinal scanners that litter sci-fi history and have since become reality.
Last edited by kupo; 11-21-2012 at 01:56 PM.
OK, I have to watch this. But now I have to watch this so to be able to read Kupo's epicness.
Don't worry, McLove. It's all the same shit I always write.
Kupo! Kupo, kupo, kupo!
I already sort of said this months ago(in which I already prophecise you liking the film).
I will marshall all the forces of darkness to hound you to an assisted suicide - Peter Capaldi, In The Loop
Well I read the bit of kupo's review Au quoted and... All About Eve already said that 62 years ago.
Lol, it's not a race, McT. I guarantee you others said it well before Mankiewicz, too. It's how it's said.
Though, saying that myself: as much as I loved this movie (and I did, lots and lots, and I suspect it will end up my film of the year), it is a film that I feel is up to a lot of the same things as Wild Grass. And I have to admit, I ultimately prefer Resnais's own surreal adventure. I will never quit pimping that film out. Splitting hairs, though: both would probably be in my top 10 of the last ten years.
Great write-up, kupo. You do the film justice!
man, this movie ruled.
I'm with CocoActual Items
In the Year 2000
As more and more people start having sex with robots, it will become increasingly embarrassing to buy a can of WD-40.
Oh, another random thing: LOOOOVED the use of rear projections for most of the driving scenes. Especially compelling in the limo, where the elongated side windows very much took on the appearance of movie screens themselves.
This film is just so full of great, carefully planned details.
And Au: so happy to see you made that observation.I thought I remembered somebody here saying something along those lines, but I hadn't yet gone back and looked over the thread again. Also, you know me so well.
Beautifully expressed, Kupo. You said a lot of the things I was thinking as I watched the film, plus some I hadn't thought of.
From a feminist perspective, I was struck by the connection between teenage Angele, who had to be punished for feeling shy and not "easy-going" with boys, and grownup Lea, who apparently was punished for her mistaken trust in a lover. And also Eva Mendes, put into Eastern slave veils and given a lullaby to sing that sometimes involves a mother killing her baby, or lamenting as her baby's eyes are pecked out by buzzards (poor Merde's eye, LOL). And Jean's "character" who leaps to her death. Why are the women punished, while the men lie down with fake erections? Fascinating stuff.
This + the 'machines' feeling like humans are tired of them = 2001 role reversal?
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