“By the quickness of God’s hand, and the slowness of our eye, we believe in the world.”
-The Mahabharata
Much has been written describing Holy Motors as a sumptuous love poem to cinema, or an eloquent sayonara to celluloid. But Leos Carax is not merely eulogizing cinema, nor mourning its death. Cinema is a multifaceted metaphor through which he questions the nature of existence: identity, destiny versus free will, authenticity, death. There is a rich metaphysical dimension to this film whose truths are perhaps better intuited than analyzed.
We join our protean antihero at dawn, a successful banker leaving his luxurious home to board the white limo that will serve as his portal to a series of disparate dreamscapes. But is this the real Monsieur Oscar? In a frenzy of rage he will later lunge from the limo and assassinate this doppelganger banker on a crowded sidewalk. And at the end of his day, the wife and daughter waving him goodbye from the terrace have been replaced by a tenement apartment and a family of chimpanzees. There is no beginning and no end, nothing intrinsically real about these colliding worlds, no evolution or narrative linking these episodic incarnations. The real is indistinguishable from the artificial. He regards the nocturnal Paris in real time on his video screen rather than through the window, his body is transformed through effects graphics into an animated reptilian porn star, he politely excuses himself from his own deathbed to an actor playing his niece who continues to mourn his absent body. Yet the pathos we feel through this masterful collaboration is real, the savage beauty is real, and the dark laughter, echoing through Carax’s strange universe, is real and eternal. Everything else is illusion, just as in cinema. As soon as we are hooked into believing, the veil is ruptured, and we seem to glimpse through the gloom the cogs that move the cosmos. Monsieur Oscar complains that the cameras used to be heavier than we are, and now we can barely see them. Cinema, as we know it, is dead. Yet we have become our own movie. We watch ourselves on Youtube and on Facebook; but is it the real us? Holy Motors teaches us that the real does not lie in the materiality that defines our banal existence, but rather in the forces that move and attract and repel us. Even the fleet of limousines, having been parked snuggly in their garage after a long day’s work, vocally lament their imminent obsolescence. “People these days don’t want machines they can see.” The truth is not shaped by the wasted forms that are decaying all around us, but in the energy that brought them into being in the first place. Holy Motors is a work that resonates with that primordial energy.
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