HOLY MOTORS: Who were we when we were who we were?

 

HOLY MOTORS is extraordinary cinema in its rawest form—it pickles the ordinary universe using something extra: a weirdly instable brine that suspends the audience too in disbelief, curiosity, and wonder.  It fucks with you, for real.  I loved it.

A plot summary is barely possible and almost superfluous but since this is a scarcely seen film here goes: a strange man named Mr. Oscar wakes up in an unknown place, possibly in a dream.  He unlocks a door in his wall and stumbles upon a theatre, where the audience sits transfixed by a film.  Cut to another time—possibly another place: Mr. Oscar leaves his family, waving to his kids and getting into a white stretched limo piloted by his loyal blond driver Celine.  Celine informs him he has nine “appointments” today, it’s going to be a busy one.   Mr. Oscar sighs and straightens his tie, ever the professional.

Here’s where things get weird.  Oscar proceeds through his appointments one by one, actions which constitute the bulk of the film.  Each appointment demands Oscar take on a new identity—and he literally transforms himself in the limo with much latex, makeup, and stage effects.  Each appointment, each little vignette Oscar participates in, ends as quickly as it begins and he returns to the limo afterwards, ripping off his costumes.

Here are the nine “appointments” Oscar has:

1-    As an OLD BEGGAR WOMAN he begs for change under a Paris bridge

2-    As a motion capture stuntman, he does green screen work and makes love to another performer

3-    As a strange, spastic demon, or perhaps a deranged leprechaun, he takes to the sewers and resurfaces during an artsy American photo shoot.  He steals the fashion model (Eva Mendes) after biting off an assistant’s finger,  and absconds to some trinket-lined cave, where the pair cuddle together in some sort of silent harmony

4-    He picks up his “daughter” from a party in Paris, chastises her when she lies about her behavior during the party.  “Don’t ever lie to me” this professional “liar” *

5-    He kills a man in a warehouse, and then shaves the man’s head and alters his body, effectively “becoming” his victim

6-    He performs a random assassination of a “banker” who is eating in a café

7-    He checks into a hotel, where a niece arrives to say goodbye to him before he dies of old age.  They have a lovely bedside goodbye as the man dies, at which point Oscar excuses himself, as he’s late for his last appointment

8-    His limo crashes into another Limo, which is driven by a woman who seems to be doing the same job he is—rushing around Paris performing random actions—and he recognizes her.   Apparently they had met 20 years before and had some sort of romance.  They have a brief romantic stroll where she suddenly breaks into choreographed song—oh, by the way she is Kylie Minouge—before he suddenly has to leave because “her partner” is arriving.  When he does, the woman—now in a wig and costume as a flight attendant—leaps from a rooftop in an apparent double suicide. *

      9-    Finally Oscar returns “home” --  a new home that’s  not where he started – and rejoins his wife and child.  They are orangutans.
  

Yes, orangutans.  As you can see—HOLY MOTORS doesn’t really resemble any film you have ever seen.  From the above you could reasonably suspect that the movie is drivel, meaningless “weirdness” meant to confuse and titillate, but not inspire or create some sort of emotional response.  You’d be wrong.  HOLY MOTORS pulls off an amazing trick—holy-moly it may just be one of the best films of the year.  There is meaning here.

I put two asterisks above on scenes 4 and 8 because I think the key to understanding the film is in the mathematics.  We know Oscar has nine tasks to perform, but the film cleverly obscures what exactly constitutes a task.  For instance, his “double” murder where he paints his victim to look like himself, does that count as one or two performances?  The banker he killed, which seemed a spontaneous action that, upon completing, Celine had to drag him back to the Limo – does that count? What about his “daughter – is that his real daughter or just his daughter for this scene, because he mentions he needs to get “back to work”? Most vitally, the romance with Kylie Minouge, they claim to have 20 minutes to spare before their next appointment so they can revive an old affair.  But then that scene explodes in the same hysterical, overwrought emotionality of the other vignettes—there is a stirring love song and beautiful rooftop vista.  Minouge commits suicide and Oscar is distraught, screaming and he rushes back into the limo.  Was that a scene, was that an appointment, or just “genuine” living between appointments?
  

At first you are inclined to think that that was the “real” Oscar, but later, when my friends with whom I saw this with it  tried to work out the numbers of Oscar’s appointments, it seemed clear that this was just another of the tasks he was to perform.  This isn’t incidental; it speaks to a major thematic point of this heavily existential film.  Playing with the postmodern device of stacked realities, we aren’t sure what behavior is the “genuine” action, how could we with these oddly-motivated “actors” riding around in limos doing behaviors just because some file tells them they need to?  What does anything in life mean if it is just a procession of scenes played out by actors, rote performances they are compelled to do?  There is no “life outside appointments” for Oscar because that too is an appointment.  We cannot escape the predestination of human interaction – we are, in a way, machines programmed to simply behave: this way, that way, this way again; stealing a kiss in the night, shooting a man in cold blood, holding a daughter to your shoulder, dying in the arms of a loving niece.  

The mechanical, cold existentialism the film espouses crystallizes amazingly in the final moment of the film.  SPOILER ALERT, if this film interests you I’d just see it rather than keep reading:

After dropping Oscar off to his last appointment, Celine says she’ll see him the next morning for another day of work, and heads off to the depot to drop off her limo.  There are many other limos pulling into this station—bright neon signs tells us its called ”Holy Motors”—presumably driven by people just like Celene, who have also just dropped off ciphers just like Oscar.  Celine lets down her hair, and puts on a mask—says to someone on the phone  that “she’s coming home.”  Perhaps she is performing an action too—perhaps she is also someone controlled by the "Agency"?  

The lights go off in the garage and suddenly—well—suddenly the unmanned parked limousines start talking to each other, their headlights flaring briefly as each “speaks” (oddly, in English).  They talk about their owners and their place as antiquated “machines” in a world where men no longer want to use machines they can see—machines with physical engines.  They refer to one another by their model numbers and talk of their long days of work.  A final headlight blinks out as the film ends.

Nonsense? Hardly.  It’s a funny joke surely, as is much of the film—designed to smack you over the head with its absurdity and visual clarity.  But the cars talking are more than a joke – they emerge as the “real” characters and one further Russian Stacking Doll in the conundrum postmodern reality of HOLY MOTORS.  A mind fuck, sure, but also a fucking mind – that’s what this cars represent.  A genuine mind functioning outside of the narrative chaos of the “Actors” outside the parking garage.  Human society, then, in the final moment, is little more than the daily work of our cars, the machines that shuttle us around, who bring us to one appointment or the next.  They are doing the true work, and we are are what they use to do it.

As Kylie Minogue sings in her mournful song sequence: who were we/ who were we/ when we were/ what we were/  back then.

It’s  a bleak message in a truly hilarious film: our love scenes, our deaths, our hard choices and big moments are more or less interchangeable and forgettable.  One human life resembles another.  We are performing the necessary scenes, and that’s all, but is it really “us” at all doing these things?  Who are we when we are who we are? 

We are living out scenes from so many generic movies—a romance, a gangster movie, a family drama.  But we are incapable of discovering anything original, because everything is programmed. We are machines indeed, celestially programmed holy motors.  Us.

You go to the movies for fun, to eat twizzlers, laugh cry get scared fall in love remember live die.  Holy Motors offers all of this and it’s glorious.  But it also asks us to think—to really think—and to engage with the ideas of the movie.  Why is that so hard somehow?  It seems against our programming to think about our programming, an amazing insight this film strips bare.   If you have the opportunity, and you can stomach it, get in your car and head to the theater.

 Or maybe walk.