At first glance, Holy Motors is all about one astonishing performance — or several, depending on how you look at it. The performance in question is by Denis Lavant, who plays M. Oscar, a blank page of a man who scribbles over himself with make-up and wigs to portray a succession of different characters. At the film’s outset he is a Parisian businessman, leaving his home in a limousine to do battle with the markets. Soon after, he is an old beggar woman, a sex robot sheathed in rubber, a gangster, a father and more. We never really know why he does this beyond — in his own words — ‘the beauty of the act’.
But then, look closer, and there’s more going on. Is it any coincidence that M. Oscar is a chain-smoker, much like Holy Motors’ director Leos Carax? Or that Carax himself appears in a prologue to the film, awakening from sleep into a cinema? No, surely it’s all just as deliberate as when the driver of the limousine, the actress Edith Scob, puts on a mask that recalls her role in George Franju’s Les yeux sans visage (1960).
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