As much as it may sound offset and disturbing film in which we meet ugly barefoot dwarf in a green suit licking armpits of Eva Mendez can't be boring and unwatchable. Whether you add to this a number of bizarrely beautiful sequences that boldly talk about life, death, the beauty of acting, and about being a father and husband with two chimpanzees, you will receive an artistic product that is full of itself, but at no time fake and corrupted.
Before the premiere at the Cannes 2012 festival, no one knew what to expect from the fifth feature film by an interesting French director, Leo Carax. They received Oscar (Denis Lavant), an eccentric chameleon, driven by his friend Celine (Edith Scob) in a white sedan daily, who performs various bizarre tasks assigned to him by the so-called. 'Agency'. The tasks are varied, from being a prostitute on a street and a dying father to a Chinese gangster. Thus Oscar, just like a real person of blood and flesh, with a metaphorical shift, changes masks and identities when a society requests it. In a neo-futuristic setting, Carax skillfully plays with the spent Hollywood flavors of the movie universe, from happy atomic families and stereotyped criminals to pathetic melodramatic figures and irritating music numbers, as well as an incomprehensible scene on the roof of an abandoned building in which Kylie Minogue presents to Paris night a cool romantic ballad.
What makes Holy Motors stand out from the vacuum of the seventh art in the past few years is the inexplicable and powerful dynamics that somehow give hope, even after 120 years of film creation, all cards on the table have not been exposed and used. The modern audience is trying to activate as much as possible to engage in infinite interpretations, which, as in this case, the director deliberately embedded in the whole. This whole is euphorically conceived in an experimental mix of variations, influenced by a great number of authors and works - from David Lynch, Gaspard Noé and Lewis Carroll to Franz Kafka, William Burroughs and Terry Gilliam. The aforementioned has been expanding even further and becoming more vast than ever. It is an ideal example of a scene in which Oscar is eating flowers walking through Pere Lachaise whose graves are nameless except for the web addresses of the deceased, suggesting such a frenzied situation in the modern digital age in which our virtual identities are more lively and louder than those of the real ones.
And indeed, there is something cathartic in this film, something that transcends reason and logic, which often become a brake in the viewer's movie experience. It is pervaded by an unprecedented sense of aesthetics and dancing heavily on the boundary between narrative expressiveness and the manic beauty of life, largely because of the expressive love of Carax toward the seventh art he is trying (and succeeds) to share with an audience is seeking something eternal.
However, using this sublime component, Carax does not seek out anything from the audience - neither patience nor understanding. Following the same path to which great authors such as Bunuel, Bergman, Hitchcock and Lynch have made before him, Carax gives the viewer a sort of "rich emptiness" that he himself has to fulfill. Thus, with an exceptional amount of reservation and distance, it organizes a mental round table around which it is trying to answer the question 'What do you want from this film.' As it usually happens, by leaving so much responsibility to the audience, in the eyes of film critics you are at the same time a goddamn fool and supernatural genius.
Among the pile of directors who reluctantly rely on conformity, secure message and charms of pop culture, it is refreshing to see an author who is not afrad to force the audience to think about what he sees, and to persuade individuals not to watch every ten minutes in a cell phone or not to dig a nose preying in popcorn, not caring for what's on the screen. Whether it is a feeling of satisfaction to which the actor / actress enters various roles or the metaphor of human transcendence, it is about 116 minutes of mere pleasure. The film is yin, life is yang. Film is simplicity, life is a mystery. Ad infinitum.
Note: This is my translation from croatian to english from Ziher hr article Eurofilm : Holy Motors, poetsko iskazivanje ljubavi prema filmu, S. Culap
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