Holy Motors in Carax’s world of bizzare love

DENNIS LIM NYT SYNDICATE THERE is a scene in Holy Motors, the new film by Leos Carax, in which two long-lost characters are reunited. One of them tells the other, “We have 20 minutes to catch up on 20 years.” This is a filmmaker who knows from lost time. “I’ve done 10, maybe 12, hours of film in 30 years,” Carax said one recent afternoon, in an interview at a tea shop in his Belleville neighbourhood. He did not sugarcoat his conclusion: “I’m not a cineaste. I’ve made so few films. Sometimes it feels each one is the last one or the first one.” Carax’s remark sums up his curious supernova trajectory: three features in his 20s, and only two since.

(He is now 51.) But it also describes the delirious energy and daredevil bravado of his movies, which could be said to capture the intensity of first sensations or the urgency of last gasps. He burst onto a moribund post-New Wave scene in the ‘80s, inspiring comparisons to Rimbaud with the flamboyant expressions of Boy Meets Girl (1984) and Mauvais Sang (1986).

The wildly romantic, hugely overbudget Lovers on the Bridge (1991) stalled his career for nearly a decade. Pola X (1999), an ambitious, eccentric Herman Melville adaptation, failed to revive it. There was an even longer gap before Holy Motors, which had its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May and opens in New York on Wednesday.

Carax has often kept the press at arm’s length. (He did not grant interviews at Cannes this year.) But seated at a sidewalk table here, sipping mint tea and chain-smoking Camels, his dog curled up at his feet, this maker of unapologetically personal films spoke about his life and work – and their interrelation – with matter-of-fact candour. “I’m not only my films,” he said at one point, “but I’m pretty much my films.” Holy Motors follows a professional shape-shifter, Monsieur Oscar (Denis Lavant), as he is chauffeured around Paris in a stretch limousine on a series of mysterious appointments. Each one calls for him to play a preassigned role: a hunched bag lady, a rabid leprechaun, an assassin (and his doppelganger victim), an old man on his deathbed. In a movie that suggests by turns commedia dell’arte, performance art and a video game, every costume change occasions a dalliance with a new genre: film noir, monster movie, domestic drama, musical.

Holy Motors plays at times like a love letter (or an elegy) to the cinema, with nods to Georges Franju and King Vidor and echoes of Carax’s earlier work. But for Carax spotting references is beside the point. “The film speaks the language of cinema, but it’s not a film about cinema,” he said. “I created a world – not our world exactly but not that far, either – and I tried to show the experience of being alive in this world.” In an interview at Cannes Lavant, who has starred in four of Carax’s five features, described Holy Motors as the apotheosis of their long collaboration. “It’s the work of a mature man,” he said.

“Leos’ way of looking at things in this film makes me think of Pier Paolo Pasolini, another great filmmaker who once said that he was like a bird in flight, which sees everything but doesn’t forgive everything.” The singer Kylie Minogue, who has a small but crucial role, said she sees it as a film about the slipperiness of identity. “It brings up questions about the potential of a human being and what particular cosmic frisson makes us the person we are,” she said.

Carax recalled that the starting points were powerful but vague. He was fascinated by the wedding limousines creeping through his neighbourhood on weekends: “They say, ‘Look at me but don’t see me.”’ He was also struck by the stooped beggars camped out near the Seine, in plain view of passersby yet routinely ignored. “I thought about how you approach someone from another world,” he said.

“That’s when I had the idea of a character who would go from life to life, experience all the states of life.” What began as an exercise in imaginative empathy evolved into an open-ended riff on metaphysical themes: the lines between acting and being, the loss of experience in a virtual age. “The virtual world is something they’re trying to sell us,” Carax said. “It’s not the same as the invisible world, which is what lives inside us.” He came to Holy Motors after a long period of trying to work outside France. He tried to make Scars, a retelling of the Faust legend set in Russia and the United States; wrote an adaptation of Henry James’ Beast in the Jungle; and toyed with the idea of a documentary about the female voice (“I would travel all over the world and record lullabies”). But nothing came to pass.

When he finally got Holy Motors off the ground he surrounded himself with a mostly young crew, which created the potential of “discovering cinema together again” and helped keep energy levels high for a quick, challenging shoot.

There were last-minute casting switches: Minogue filled the part written for Juliette Binoche, a former muse and girlfriend, after Carax and Binoche had a falling out. Permission to shoot in the Samaritaine, a grand former department store, was denied by the new owners and only granted after some string-pulling from Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, an old flame.

Carax has always been prone to morbid romanticism, but Holy Motors, the first movie of his middle age, is even more palpably death-haunted than usual. The most obvious demise in question is that of celluloid: this is Carax’s first digital feature. “Video is freeing but also lazier,” he said. “You have to recreate the love of the moment.” The industrywide shift to digital “reminds me of the way the pharmaceutical companies invent medicine.” He added, “It makes me feel, what is this supposed to cure?” But Holy Motors, which attests to the persistence of cinema in the absence of film, is not entirely gloomy. While it was partly born of what Carax called “the fatigue of being oneself,” its very premise, with the perpetual promise of rebirth, counters that weariness. “All my films originated from this fear of life, fear of loss, and also a childish hope of being born again,” he said.

Before Holy Motors the plots of Carax’s features could all be described by the title of his debut: boy meets girl. Not just any boy – most of them starred Lavant as a character named Alex (Carax’s given name) – and not just any girl. Carax was romantically involved with the lead actresses of his previous films: Mireille Perrier, Binoche, Yekaterina Golubeva.

“Very few people have filmed their lovers so many times,” he said. “It does affect life. It’s beautiful but it’s also destructive.” Carax said he never rewatches his films, but it is not hard to detect a sense of mourning when he talks about them, given the degree to which they now stand for old relationships and lost friends. Jean- Yves Escoffier, his first cinematographer, died in 2003. Golubeva, the mother of his 7-year-old daughter, died last year, as did one of his longtime producers, Albert Prevost.

“You make films for the dead,” Carax said, “but they’re seen by the living.” Carax said he lived a largely solitary existence and felt more separate than ever from the Paris film industry. “They’re fed up with me and I’m fed up with them,” he said, adding: “I cannot complain. I found my strength in being alone, and then I felt too alone.” He keeps up with the work of his favourite filmmakers – Jean-Luc Godard, Alexander Sokurov – and sometimes sees a new movie he likes (the recent sci-fi teenage thriller Chronicle, for one). But he’s far from a cinephile. “I’m afraid to see the films I loved when I was younger, but they’re still with me,” he said.

A paradox seems to emerge as Carax discusses his current relationship with film. How can a man who barely makes and rarely watches movies claim to be “always in cinema”? He shrugged, as if the answer was obvious. “Cinema is a territory,” he said. “It exists outside of movies. It’s a place I live in.

It’s a way of seeing things, of experiencing life. But making films, that’s supposed to be a profession.”

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