French film-maker Leos Carax returns to the silver screen with the immensely bonkers Holy Motors.  His first feature film since 1999’s Pola X, this Denis Lavant fuelled drama is clearly the spawn of years’ worth of unusual creative juices.  French artists of all kinds often display a taste for the truly off-beat and Carax’s latest is no exception.  Love Holy Motors or hate it, odds are good it will prove to be the year’s most bizarre cinematic experience.

Holy Motors is nearly impossible to adequately summarise.  To say the film follows a man (Lavant) as he is driven around Paris in a limousine conducting “appointments” wouldn’t be inaccurate, but it only scratches the surface.  Carax himself appears onscreen in an airport hotel room where a secret door opens into a vast, dream-like cinema in which a large audience is suspended in time.  This haunting scene soon gives way to the introductions of Lavant’s rogue (if that is indeed what he is) Monsieur Oscar, a master of disguise; able to transform his appearance and mannerisms at will.  In many ways he is playing an actor where the world is his stage.  The course of one mere day sees Monsieur Oscar take on a wide variety of roles: father, banker, beggar, hit man and just maybe Berberian Sound Studio’s “dangerously aroused” goblin.  The situations and scenarios in which Monsieur Oscar finds himself often honour and mock cinema at once, with the absurdity of performance fully on display.  Along the way he encounters a few familiar faces.  Eva Mendes has a central role in Holy Motors’ most shocking (and thanks to a brilliant skewering of the fashion industry, funniest) sequence.  In the final minutes, Kylie Minogue appears to sing “Who Were We?” in character of Eva (or is it Jean?).  Yet the exquisite oddity that permeates each minute of Holy Motors and takes grotesque form in Lavant is the unopposed star of the show and will linger longer after the film’s final scene draws to a close.
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