Holy Motors (MA). Director: Leos Carax. Starring: Denis Lavant. 115 minutes
A man (Lavant) is picked up from a luxurious rural home by a limousine. He asks his driver-secretary how many appointments he has; nine, he is told. Weary before he has begun, the man begins a slow process of transformation in front of a lighted dressing-room mirror mounted in the back of the limo. What follows in this elaborately allegorical film is a portrayal of a most unusual day in which the only constant is transformation.
One moment the man is an elderly beggar woman, so agonisingly stooped that all 'she' sees of the world is 'stones and feet'. Next he is a motion capture artist, clad in a black body-stocking studded with sensors, miming the gestures of sex and combat to be digitally transmuted into anime. The old woman and the stuntman reveal the man's total control over his physical self, though his psychological and spiritual selves remain indistinct.
Next he is a monstrous vagrant, who crawls out of a sewer and terrorises passers-by with hilarious ferocity. He desecrates a fashion shoot in a graveyard (which itself is surely a kind of desecration), brutally assaulting a photographer before absconding with the swooning model. Back in the sewer they are beauty and the beast, as she recognises vulnerability and tenderness beneath his frightening veneer.
It is obvious by now that the man's existence is not what we'd describe as normal; not unique either though, because there are indications that there are others — perhaps many — who are rolling around in limousines and living similar chameleonic lives. At one moment he is a father belittling his teenage daughter to the point of tears; the next, a dangerous mobster; then an old man bonding with his granddaughter on his deathbed.
The face of the film changes, too, with that of its central character. So that now it is D-grade horror, now it is domestic drama, now it is a violent thriller, and now it is a Hollywood musical (Australian pop singer Kylie Minogue appears here, speaking French, as a fellow chameleon with whom the man shares a painful past — unless this, too, is another performance). The film traverses this diverse terrain with great cinematic poise.
The man integrates just as seamlessly with his environments, and others interact with him as if this — this — is his true face. Then he returns to the limousine,