HOLY MOTORS

The new film by Leos Carax is Holy Motors and it's one of the most wondrous, joyous and confounding films in recent memory.

Its subject is an extraordinary man named Oscar (Denis Levant). The first time we meet Oscar he's a businessman, but that isn't always the case. Every day he's picked up by a limo and whisked around Paris to different appointments where he adopts some sort of amazing disguise and practices what can best be described as spontaneous method acting. At first these displays look like pranks or performance art, later we learn that they are scenes for movies, but that technology has progressed to the point that cameras are invisible.

The film settles into an episodic structure, where each segment covers different genre's of cinema. Carax gives us melodrama, silent comedy, animation, teen angst, gangsters and even a musical number in one giant, anarchic stew. The most memorable vignette is a rip-roaring horror homage featuring Oscar as a flower eating sewer monster who kidnaps Eva Mendes from a graveyard fashion shoot Phantom of the Opera style.

With all the absurd imagery and overt homages, it would be tempting to simply call the film a "journey through cinema" and leave it at that. It's a valid reading but a bit reductive. The films main thrust seems to be commenting on the ways that modern technology has altered the way we interact. For instance, I kept wondering to what degree Oscar's "co-stars" know that they're being filmed. Some of them are clearly other actors working for the same mysterious agency, others seem to be innocent bystanders who's privacy is arguably being invaded by Oscar's activities. Perhaps it doesn't matter. We now live in a world where everyone has a camera phone and the internet documents everything, we've come to expect less privacy. Our public selves are becoming more calculated and less real. Someone like Oscar, who lives his life only through constructed avatars, seems like a logical extreme of how technology might alter the way we interact.

Carax shows us not just the artifice of Oscar's acting jobs, but the craftsmanship behind it. We see Oscar apply a dizzying array of wigs, scars, beards, contacts, etc.. We know it's fake, he shows us it's fake, yet Levant's performances feel so real. In the space of ten minutes he is equally believable and compelling as a disappointed father, a hit man and a dying old man. We don't know if any of these versions of Oscar are the real him, but we sense that they all could be. Levant's performance is absolutely mind blowing. Not having seen any of Lavant's other performances, but after Holy Motors, it's tempting to declare him the worlds greatest actor, in this film he can literally "play anything."

There's been a lot of talk in the past year about whether cinema is "dead." Personally, I feel that an art form cannot die, it can waver in overall quality and evolve, but not die. That said there's a valid argument to be made for Motors being an intentional elegy. In interviews Carax has been cynical about both the direction of cinema and the modern world and despite the films giddy emotional heights, the film does have a vaguely funereal vibe to it. But if Carax is trying to usher cinema into the grave he has failed in the most wonderful way anyone can. Holy Motors very existence proves how vibrant, magical and alive movies still are and leaves one excited for the next 100 years of the medium. Long live cinema!

Grade: A

Note: Holy Motors is currently streaming on Netflix Instant