Holy Motors

After a thirteen-year lull Leos Carax, the enfant terrible of French film, got triumphally back. In a film that many had tipped for 2012 Palme d’Or at Cannes, the director’s faithful partner Denis Lavant embodies the mysterious Monsieur Oscar, who in the course of a single day assumes a whole range of identities in a disturbing "performance” in front of invisible cameras. "What makes you carry on?” asks his boss, played by Michel Piccoli. "The beauty of the act,” replies Lavant’s chame­leonesque hero in what could be a paraphrase of Carax’s own creative creed, which he has shared with us in a mere five films over nearly thirty years. His characteristically anguished romantic vision is combined with a provocative playfulness and a veneration of some of the more bizarre milestones of cinema (among them Georges Franju’s Les yeux sans visage). Woven into this bewitching spectacle is a love of Paris (watching helplessly as the legendary Samaritaine department store goes into terminal decline), the vanishing world of the limousine, and the songs of Kylie Minogue.