mission implausible
by
Douglas Messerli
Leos
Carax (writer and director) Holy Motors / 2012
So
many critics have found Leos Carax’ perplexing and have described it as utterly
surreal that I’m not certain the film, sent to me by Netflix yesterday, was the
same one they saw. Yes, there certainly are many strange moments in Holy
Motors. Limousines speak to each other, one of the limo’s driver returns
home with a complete plastic face mass, and the activities of the film’s hero
(Denis Lavant) at times are almost inexplicable.
The rest of his day, after leaving his
loving family, is spent in his portrayals of various figures assigned to him,
as if he were accepting a series of roles out of the old TV series Mission
Impossible, a wonderful TV regular which my husband Howard and I dubbed as Mission
Implausible, but which we still loved to watch each week.
As in that series, we see him—in the limo
driven by a beautiful and taciturn woman Céline (Édith Scob)—carefully applying
facial attachments, false mustaches, beards, wigs, and other applications in
order to play out the various roles which throughout the day he is assigned: in
one he is an old beggar women; in another—dressed in a tightly-fitted latex
costumer, festooned with lights, he plays out a
kind of Kung Fu hero, who
through back-lit scenes and a running treadmill, fights out endless battles
with nonexistent enemies before having metaphoric sex with a latex-covered
female; in another scene he becomes a kind of madman, literally chewing up the
scenery (in this case flowers from the famed Paris cemetery Pere Lachaise
strewn on gravestones that instead of naming the buried ask us to visit their
websites). In this scene he also kidnaps a beautiful photo model, rushing her
off into a cave-like room where he rearranges her gown to represent a Muslim
woman before undressing himself and revealing a total erection. Gently, she
puts his head to her breast before he falls asleep on her lap, as if she were
saving her life like Scheherazade confronting her sultan.
In the midst of these mad-like maneuvers
the always-on-call actor, Monsieur Oscar (obvious a punch at the US film
awards) performs, with other musicians a rather delightful accordion concert in
a church, before moving on to become a father picking up his shy and unhappy
daughter from a party whereat she has mostly hidden in the bathroom.
Soon after he dresses as a scarred
gangster, violently slashing his enemy in the throat before scarring the other
man’s face to look like his own.
He shoots a banker and is killed by that
man’s bodyguards. He is a dying old man visited by a niece, Léa (Élise L'Homeau), and
dies, only to arise again to meet a fellow thespian, who sings a song
suggesting that the two once had a child together. She has her own “assignment,”
in which as an airline stewardess she meets her partner only for them both to
leap to their deaths from a highrise building.
If the audience is asleep, so too is
Oscar getting tired, yet, as he explains, he loves the roles, finds pleasure in acting itself,
even if Carax makes it quite clear that the genre pieces in which he performs
have utterly no meaning or coherence. The camera, having completely become
invisible, is only the director’s camera. Filmmaking for Oscar has become a
kind of life wherein he goes without meals and is “getting tired.”
By film’s end even the several limos used
by the various actors who inhabit them know that their time is limited. Who’s
interested the glamor of filmmaking today they hint.
Carax’s quite brilliant film, to me, was not
a surrealist mish-mash as so many otherwise sane reviewers described it, as a
quite funny satire of the industry, particularly the world of actors who day in
must take their assignments, turning their lives inside-out to become people
other than they really are. Love is on run. In the end, even the seemingly
caring limo driver, who from to moment advises her rider of his next
appointments and worries from him having eaten nothing, returns to her own
domestic situation in a mask, obviously pretending someone she is truly not. After all, this actress herself played just such a figure in Eyes without a Face.
In this film it is not the motors who are
truly holy in their long drives across the cityscape, but the actors who have
given up their lives to often utterly absurd and meaningless pretense.
If, as Roger Ebert argued about the film:
“It's not tame. Some audience members are going to grow very restless” yet at least, unlike the audience we see at the beginning of this energetic
film, they will not fall to sleep.
Los
Angeles, July 7, 2019
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review (July 2019).
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