The first image on screen in Leos Carax’s Holy Motors is some silent era footage of a naked man throwing what looks like a brick at the ground. It cuts to an audience asleep in the theater, dreaming. That’s what Holy Motors feels like: a long episodic fever dream. Director Leos Carax wakes up in an airport hotel in the middle of the night and sees the forest for the trees and finds a door into the theater. He looks at the screen and Holy Motors gets to its true beginning. He is the only one who is engaged with the screen, the modern audience put to sleep by either boredom or apathy.
Constructed episodically, Holy Motors playfully covers genres and moods without breaking pace. The main character, Oscar, is a man of many faces. He is an actor who travels Paris and plays his part in a number of different productions, from hitman to dying father. Carax uses every genre to his advantage, telling a revised history of film.
The very first part Oscar plays is an old woman begging on the street. It’s hard not to see this as Carax again, directly engaging with the medium. Oscar says in an old woman voice-over “I am so old, I am afraid I may never die.” Carax loves the medium, but sees it for what it is: an old dying technology slowly giving way to new digital ways of filmmaking. This idea is addressed so many times throughout the film, it feels like an eulogy for film.
The first part Oscar plays comes into even more clarity when compared with the part it’s juxtaposed with. Oscar arrives at a massive industrial complex, and acts now in a different method. Oscar does some traditional fighting motion capture, a technology that is used in almost every big budget movie today. The setting and the action are clearly pointed at the Hollywood system of making movies and treating them like products instead of what Carax believes they are: art. After playing on his own, a female actor enters the arena with Oscar. After seducing him, the two engage in simulated sex. Carax frames this to be sensual and beautiful, despite the constant squeaking of the latex suits. However, when we see what the computer is animating, it is a disgusting fantasy of what we see the actors doing; a bastardization of the human form. Carax seems to take a stance on CGI here: it cannot be a substitute for humans.
This is a big theme of Holy Motors: the fear of becoming outdated and useless; most directly vocalized by the limousines the very end of the film. “We are inadequate,” one of the limos says, another states “Yes, men don’t want visible machines anymore.” In our march towards progress in the film industry, we are leaving behind machines and methods that make movies what they are. The “holy motors” referenced in the title aren’t only the limousines the actors use to get around, but the cameras used to capture them.
Holy Motors is also obsessed with what qualifies as beautiful, or what catches people's imaginations and compels them to try and capture it. When Oscar dresses as a sewer-dwelling leprechaun monster, a fashion photographer is enraptured with the horror instead of the model he is originally shooting. However, the capturing of that beauty is impossible, and will always be a simulation of the real thing, like the motion capture monsters from earlier in the film. The idea of the “false” goes even further when we are introduced to the other Oscar’s running around Paris. How do we know which Oscar we have been following around if it wasn’t for his chauffeur? It gets even harder to parse once one Oscar kills another and takes his place. Actors are all competing for the same roles.
Carax wants us to be confused and enthralled by the movie. With its genre-hopping episodic construction, Holy Motors is constantly engaging the medium. Carax puts cinematic signifiers everywhere to alert us of his world. When a character breaks into song during a dramatic moment late into the movie, it feels totally natural; an extension of film. It’s a celebratory wake for a medium that seems to be lost unless you have the massive financial backing needed to produce a film. It seems even more pointed since Carax was forced to shoot Holy Motors digitally. It is so bursting at the seams with ideas and references it is a feat that it even got made at all.
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