Holy Motors

Oh, right.

That’s what I want my house to look like!

Nice.

Anyway, after I watched the other Carax movies (one was good, one wasn’t), I watched a couple of the documentaries that were included on the discs, and… well, they made me less excited about watching more Carax movies?

Oh, this is the one where Levant plays that he’s portraying a Bulgarian beggar in Paris…

Or, er, non.

That’s a very pretty factory. The French even has pretty factories!

So this movie is gonna be a series of tableaux where Levant performs a role for a couple of minutes and then it’s on to the next thing? Is that like a comment on film-making?

There’s no doubt that Carax is able to get a lot of talented people on board to do this thing. Like this scene — it lasts for ten seconds, but must have been so much work to put together.

And is this biting satire? Or just kinda… eh?

BITING SATIRE

(As I’m fond of saying: “Satire” is another way of spelling “not actually funny”.)

This movie looks great, but it really feels like the impetus for making this is to see just how far he could push Denis Levant. In the previous scene, you had this gorgeous pietà scene, but with Levant in the Christ role sporting a very rigorous erection for quite a long time (I can’t show you a snap of that here, since this is a family oriented blog)… It really reads as if Carax just wants to fuck around with Levant, making him suffer?

That’s probably way off the mark, but that’s what this feels like.

It’s like the movie is saying something deep like “in life, we’re all playing roles”.

Yeah, it the sets and stuff look great, but the actual images look kinda meh:

Carax was able to sway potential investors concerned with the film’s budget by switching to digital photography, a process of which he strongly disapproves.