Leos Carax (France, born 1960)

Holy Motors (2012)

(This review was written as part of the BBC’s 100 Greatest Films of the 21st Century and does not necessarily read as well when taken out of its original context. It is reproduced here for the convenience of having a director’s works collected on the same page.)

What does it all mean?

There’s a scene towards the end of French director Leos Carax’s Holy Motors where the characters played by the characters played by Denis Levant and Kylie Minogue are ascending some stairs (none of that sentence is a typo). Kylie, who has no trouble walking whatsoever, is lifted into the air, bridal-style, by Denis, who, against a backdrop of incredibly grave and solemn string music and some sweeping camerawork, carries her the rest of the way before depositing her, upright, at the top, where she continues to walk normally before (at the risk of spoiling one of the film’s most striking moments) breaking gravely and solemnly into song.

What does it all mean?

When a film is deliberately obtuse and eschews all forms of conventional narrative, you often see the same sorts of criticisms: it was incomprehensible, it was incoherent, it was pretentious. It mistook nonsense for meaning, vapidity for profundity, inanity for genius. It had nowhere near the insight or depth it appeared to purport. But even if I did find Holy Motors dull at times, and a bit frustrating, and I certainly wouldn’t have wanted to watch the whole thing in one sitting, the levels of artistry displayed in the film, solely on their own merits, would immediately render such accusations moot, if not unfair.

The problem: How do you review a film that you didn’t really understand?

Holy Motors tends to teeter on the brink of incomprehensibility and pretension without ever really losing itself to them, largely thanks to an extremely assured film-making hand, a bravura central performance from its lead actor, and some impressive tonal control. It is something of a tightrope walk, a conjuror’s trick. It is a film which is very deliberately both completely ridiculous and incredibly serious.

Its vignette structure may well have derailed a lesser film with similar intentions, as it almost begs a reviewer to call it ‘disjointed’, but here Leos Carax shamelessly exploits it to his own advantage- just when it seems that Holy Motors is about to disappear up its own proverbial backside, he changes tack, changes setting, and effectively gives us a piece of an entirely different film altogether. It’s sleight of hand. We’ve already forgotten that we didn’t like the previous vignette very much. Suddenly the work has become vital and alive again, and we can fully understand why it was such a critical rave. Or at least, we think we can.

Tone is everything in Holy Motors. It has to be, really, in an art film with no plot to speak of, but even within those parameters, its success (or otherwise) relies on tone to an almost-absolute degree. If these vignettes were presented in any other order, we would be experiencing an entirely different film, one which would most likely have fallen off the tightrope, on either its absurd side or its serious one, and subsequently been reviewed far less favourably. But here we are, looking down the barrel of what may very well be something of a masterpiece. I didn’t love it- it’s too studious, too clinical, and yes, too incomprehensible, to inspire that level of devotion in me. Still, a masterpiece it may very well be.

What does it all mean? I dunno. Maybe I’m not supposed to. But, like Synecdoche, New York, it seems to be, certainly in its more morose scenes, about death. And that song that Kylie breaks into, with its repeated, insistent refrain of ‘Who are we?’, may well be expounding the film’s central theme straight to our faces in almost a parody of narrative clarity. Who are we? Are we all of the characters inhabited by Denis Levant’s enigmatic chameleon-man? Are we none of them? Are we the passive, often deeply unfortunate bit-players in his set-pieces? Are we all, as suggested by the assassin segment, somehow killing ourselves? Are we all already dead?

Annette (2021)

Well, I don’t know about this one.

Annette is the latest in an increasingly long list of movies I am reviewing in which a great amount of skill and expertise has been put into the ‘look’ of the film, and it is very visually resplendent, and one feels almost unable to give it a bad review because of this. In Annette’s case, it is also a ‘risky’, ballsy, unusual film- a musical, no less- which throws lots of odd and off-kilter material at the audience, including the incorporation of puppetry, and stands pointedly apart from the sort of sanitised and samey movies that tend to make all the money in these mercenary times.

It’s art.

However, you can’t like every single piece of art- it would be a strange world if you did- and if I go into a gallery, there will be many pieces that, for whatever reason, I don’t like, even if their merit is palpable and I personally don’t have the required skillset to produce anything like that myself.

I didn’t like Annette.

In my Holy Motors review, I made the point that I didn’t love it, yet did find it to be a beguiling work that positively hummed in a supple- possibly even virtuoso- display of fluidity and cohesion. These are not qualities, unfortunately, that I felt Annette shared. Its genre-hopping melting pot of tone and timbre cannot be the problem, at least not solely, as Holy Motors (rather gleefully) employed these dynamics too. It may be the inherent awkwardness I feel when the characters are breaking into song, the inexplicable nature of such a thing, the perceived unnaturalness of it all (I’ve never been the fan of the musical genre).

But there were other problems. I found long sections of the movie- nearly half an hour longer than Holy Motors- to be a dull and wearying slog. I didn’t like the songs- I thought they were leaden and uninspired, often irritatingly repeating the same phrase over and over. I didn’t like Adam Driver’s central character, Henry- you’re not ultimately supposed to, so I can’t really use that as a marker of creative failure, but still, it didn’t help. Where Marion Cotillard and Simon Helberg’s characters were concerned, I neither liked nor disliked them- I didn’t find the characterisation strong enough in either case to make an impression.

I thought the sequence featuring Henry’s stand-up comedy- ironic, metatextual, arrogant as all hell, and crashingly unfunny- was wickedly well-observed. Other than that, I can’t really recommend the picture. However, if you like your experimentalism theatrical and iridescent, and especially if you are a fan of the band Sparks, who provide the music, then by all means give it a go.

The Night is Young (1986)

(This film is also known as Mouvais Sang and Bad Blood).

The Night is Young follows Alex, played by Denis Levant from Holy Motors, a young guy in his early twenties who lives in a bedsit and seems to kinda maybe live on the wrong side of the law (it’s unclear) and has a fiery romance with a teenage Julie Delpy from which he walks away with a flurry of highly wrought quasi-poetic pronouncements. He then gets involved with two much older men, along with a young Juliette Binoche, and seems to be part of some sort of criminal enterprise.

The movie is extremely Gallic, almost overwhelming so, as Levant skulks and pouts his way through his lead performance, an ever-present roll-up cigarette hanging from his mouth. The other characters are hardly any warmer or more expressive. It’s difficult to tell if Alex is an out-an-out hoodlum- he behaves like one, at least to some degree, but we are given very little background on him or his motivations. Perhaps it was briefly explained why and how he gets involved with the two older men and I missed it.

I didn’t understand the movie, and neither did I feel as if I was particularly missing anything in my lack of understanding. As Alex lifts someone’s car up in the street and tips it over onto its back for no reason, or performs a dance sequence to David Bowie’s Modern Love, completely out of sync with the sullen tone of the rest of the movie, one has to wonder- is some post-modern trick being played on the viewer? My guess is not, as whatever feelings one may have about this material, Carax appears to be presenting it to us quite seriously, and I think the viewer is supposed to receive it- even enjoy it- on a relatively sincere level.

As a curio for fans of Delpy and Binoche, who may be particularly interested in the performances they gave pre-fame, I suspect the film will be a disappointment on that level too. Both of them play background characters whose main job is to stay stony-faced and help maintain the air of unflappable, mordant hipsterism that the movie insistently perpetuates, whilst also, I imagine, looking very striking and chic. If one compares it directly to Holy Motors, then the later film felt much more lively and buoyant and rounded, and simply held my interest far better.