Holy Motors (***)

“It’s so weird,” says someone about midway through this movie, observing the main character in one of his many guises. And it might well apply to the movie itself. But it’s easy to make a weird movie. Having it be coherent and worth watching is another. For a weird movie, the story structure is simple. Virtually the entire film follows the exploits of “Monsieur Oscar” (Denis Lavant), as his driver calls him. He at first appears to be a businessman of some importance, judging by his plush limousine. Perhaps he is engaged in a criminal enterprise, judging by the phone call he makes, something about needing guns. When he gets out of the vehicle, he is dressed as an old woman shuffling along with a severely hunched back. But, soon enough, it’s back in the car for the next “appointment.” There, he seems to be doing acrobatics; computer graphics transform his motions into the acts of a mythical creature on a large screen.

And so on, all around Paris, from day into night. Each of the scenes is dramatic and, often, visually arresting on its own. In one, the actress Eva Mendes appears as a photographer’s model. In the most melodramatic segment, the singer and onetime soap-opera star Kylie Minogue plays a woman from Monsieur Oscar’s past. Is there an explanation for all of this? Yes, and I appreciated that, but at the same time, what really ties the vignettes together is the voyeuristic pleasure they provide and that is the province of cinema. That sounds a bit pretentious, but the film, excepting perhaps the part with Minogue, is not, and the ending is outright comedic/whimsical. (Or maybe it is melancholy, depending on how you look at it.) Only briefly is the movie violent. Though I found myself a little less captivated in the second hour, on the whole the movie is likely to amuse those who appreciate the unusual. It must have been a nice acting challenge for Lavant, who had also costarred in director Leo Carax’s The Lovers on the Bridge (1991).

IMDb link

viewed 12/12/12 7:00 at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 12/13–15/12