Cinematic recluse Leos Carax's new film Holy Motors loosely tells the story of M. Oscar (a fearless Denis Lavant), a man who routinely changes his appearance, and disembarks a chauffeured limousine to act out parts in other people's lives.
Early on, the film dips and sways in and out of a tetherable reality, even within its own surreal setting. You get a handle, you think, on some 'base' narrative, and then that too shifts and changes skin and you're left watching a man playing a man killing a man who looks just like himself.
But it's never confusing, and instead these vignettes draft a kind've spindly, twinkling thread of dream-logic; something that you can sense and follow in your peripheral understanding, but if you strain your senses to see it in its completeness, it will evade you immediately.
Holy Motors is cinema looking inwards in a way that feels beyond post-modern. It's an introspection upon the new cinematic experience that feels so much more immediate than something for the sake of style, or form, and the resulting film literally heaves and sighs with the reinvigorated lifeforce of cinema because of it.
