homersimpson_esq
Posts: 19962
Joined: 30/9/2005
From: Springfield
|
Apologies for blog links - that's how it is in the blog. *innocent*
Anyway, my film of the year....
#01. Holy Motors
Until earlier this year, when I was flicking through a copy of Sight and Sound, I had never heard of Leos Carax. His last film had been out ten years or so ago. Back then I was busy about to become a new father and, furthermore, my international film viewing was woefully inadequate. Since he is apparently not spoken of much, it is perhaps unsurprising I had never heard of him. However, since the press for this film has been almost uniformly positive, praising its beauty while scratching heads at its meaning, it became one of those “have to see” films. So I did. True story.
Monsieur Oscar (Denis Lavant) is a businessman of unspecified employment. Over the course of a day and a night he is engaged in a variety of assignments which require him to become – act – different things. A vagrant, an old man, a father, a lover, and, in a memorable scene within a film made entirely of memorable scenes, a motion-capture actor, playing out a perverse CGI love scene like no other. The scene did not appear in The Hobbit. Few words are exchanged – there are conversations between M. Oscar and his driver Celine (Édith Scob), but Oscar is largely quiet between his “scenes”.
Going in “blind” to Carax’s oeuvre and intent, I am reacting to what is on screen. Not to what Carax may have intended, or is portraying, but what the final product says to me. With a film as mellifluous and picaresque as this, interpretation is king. It becomes clear (insofar as anything in this film is clear) that Oscar is playing to an audience. We never see the cameras – it is mentioned that the cameras have become smaller, more surreptitious – and so one starts to consider: are we the audience? The film opens with a shot of an audience. The screen as mirror. Oscar is playing to an unseen audience, and never reacts direct to camera; never breaks the fourth wall, arguably because he cannot see the cameras. The un-clarified audience have a range of assignments for Oscar, such that it is almost like channel-hopping. Through the wild variance of roles, we build a picture not only of Oscar, but also of cinema itself.
Each role can, arguably, be seen as a facet of Oscar himself. As father, lover, old man. As vagrant, as mo-cap actor. In that scene, particularly, it is Denis Lavant playing Oscar playing a mo-cap actor playing a CGI character. We have to go deeper. Where does reality end and fiction begin? At what remove is believability no longer a consideration?
Similarly, the film is replete with filmic references. As with ParaNorman, I am confident many references sailed above my head. The film is dense and packed and will be rewarding after multiple viewings, and after other films have been viewed in between. But Kylie Minogue – a superb piece of acting – is visually reminiscent of Jean Seberg in Breathless, while Édith Scob dons a mask that recalls her role in Eyes Without A Face.
Is it pretentious? Yes. Is it going divide people hugely? Oh, yes. Is it murky, unclear, ambiguous, and indefinable? Yes. But is it fun? Definitely. It’s a whirlwind of weird tearing through the artifices of cinema and uprooting cliché to become something fresh. Pretentiousness can be sanctimony or parsimony, but here it becomes fun. It takes something recognisable – reality TV, exploitation, an almost science fiction futurist dystopia – and obfuscates it in layers of self-referentiality, clashing ideals, and a sense of knowing fun. The chap sat a few seats from me walked out after about forty minutes, which is a shame, because he missed the talking cars.
_____________________________
That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne.  TREK WARS |
Printable Version
Homer's Top 24 of 2012 - 
New Messages
No New Messages
Hot Topic w/ New Messages
Hot Topic w/o New Messages
Locked w/ New Messages
Locked w/o New Messages
Post New Thread