Without question, the strangest film I’ve seen all year is Leos Carax‘s my review saying so much writing:
Trying to explain Leos Carax’s Holy Motors is an impossible task as far as I’m concerned. Perhaps I could sit down with it for a solid week and give you additional insight, but 24 hours after seeing it this is the best I can do.
The opening paragraph to my review continued the sentiment:
What the hell did I just watch? This was my first reaction to Leos Carax’s Holy Motors, a movie that is not so much a movie as it is a collection of ideas, visuals and themes all in an effort to present a commentary on the current state of filmmaking… I think.
The film certainly caused a stir and was ultimately picked up by Indomina Group and will hit New York theaters on October 17 (it’s also playing the New York Film Festival on October 11) and will slowly expand across the country throughout the next two months. For a list of theaters click here.
That said, Hit Fix has just debuted the first domestic poster for the film, which I’ve included directly below along with the synopsis below that.
This isn’t an easy film to tackle on your own. It was the first film I saw at Cannes that really deserved a lenghty, post-screening discussion. I ultimately gave the film a “C” in my review, noting, at the end, “It’s admittedly different, but I had a hard time finding much of a concrete message within it all as much as a saw a director experimenting to various degrees of success and presenting a film that isn’t really a film at all.”
I stand by that statement, but wouldn’t necessarily say it’s a bad thing… See it for yourself and then decide is probably the best advice I can give. But doesn’t that go for just about everything?
Over the course of a single day, Monsieur Oscar travels by limousine around Paris to a series of nine “appointments,” transforming into new characters or incarnations at each stop. Fetched in the morning by Celine, his trusty chauffeur on this surreal journey, Oscar begins the day as a captain of industry. Then he becomes a gypsy crone, begging for spare change on a bridge over the Seine. Inside a digital production facility, he’s a ninja warrior transformed by cutting-edge technology into a reptilian sex god. Next he’s a gibberish-spewing troglodyte who kidnaps a fashion model from a photo shoot in Pere-Lachaise cemetery, ferrying her to his underground lair in the sewers. Then he’s the melancholy father of a teenage daughter, followed by a shadowy assassin sent to kill his own doppelganger, a dying old man, and finally a thwarted lover revisiting a flame from his past atop a decaying Right Bank department store next to the Pont-Neuf. Monster movie, film noir, romantic drama, musical, crime thriller, futuristic sex fantasia…
Holy Motors is all of these and, then again, none of these. It is a ravishing, shape-shifting, fever dream of becoming, unraveling and starting all over again. From celluloid magic to the digital data stream, Monsieur Oscar’s epic journey of the soul is all of our dreams.
