Holy Motors

This full-throttle cinematic fever dream stars Carax’s longtime muse Denis Lavant as 11 different characters—or maybe one character with 11 different identities—who crisscross Paris in a white stretch limousine over the course of one long, Borgesian, Lynchian day. There’s no mistaking the true location of the movie, however, for anywhere but Carax’s own feverish, movie-mad imagination… In fact, one could argue that the “story” of Holy Motors is that of cinema itself, as the form of the film hopscotches wildly from fairy tale to thriller to musical to melodrama, with the astonishing Lavant morphing from a besieged businessman into a sewer-dwelling cretin, a virtual-reality serpent, a hired killer (and his victim), and a dying old man being visited by his niece. All the while, Carax’s camera lyrically cranes and pirouettes around the streets of a nighttime Paris that has scarcely seemed more alive with narrative possibilities. Some of the vignettes derive from stalled Carax features, while others glance affectionately at cinema’s past (like the haunting, sung-through meeting of estranged lovers Lavant and Kylie Minogue, straight out of Jacques Demy). At every turn, you feel Carax contemplating what cinema has been, is, and may yet become, and what—if any—place he can still find for himself in it.

Scott Foundas, Film Comment

This absurdist ode to analog’s death at digital’s hands seems to echo a number of recent essays eager to perform the last rites on cinema, or at least on its status as our dominant dream factory. Yet Holy Motors is such a bravura, go-for-broke exploration of what movies can do—is so thrillingly, defiantly alive—that it contradicts its own mournful thesis at every turn.

Mike D’Angelo

It’s a gift for moviegoers to have this much freedom, and exhilarating. In Holy Motors you never know where Mr. Carax will take you and you never know what, exactly, you’re to do once you’re there.

Manohla Dargis, NY Times

Unclassifiable, expansive, and breathtaking.

Melissa Anderson, Village Voice