Leos Carax’s Holy Motors is a surrealist travel into a director’s mind and his concerns about the decline of cinema.
According to a lot of critics, the film was made for the Palme d’Or at Cannes, but the usual suspects (Michael Haneke, Ken Loach…) prevented Leos Carax from getting any prize. Holy Motors is definitely on the experimental side of movie-making and does not avoid some overthought sequences or lynchean clichés, but it has fragments of undeniable tormented beauty. Lead actor, Denis Vaillant, plays an incredible character named « Mister Oscar » (from Leos Carax’s real name) who changes skin, hair and attitude every fifteen minutes to impersonate a killer, an old man dying, or « Monsieur Merde », a strange and silent beast of a man who kidnaps Eva Mendes. He then takes her to the underground tunnels and composes with her a scene of tremendous beauty, somewhere between a Caravage painting and a fashion shoot.