Holy Motors

This starts out like you’re watching a Tropfest DVD, a sequence of short films. It ends up in much the same place. In this case the signature item that thinly binds the whole together is nothing more than actor Denis Levant.

There’s speculation this series of narrative non sequiturs describes the nature of an actor’s life and the potential loss of one’s own identity, or further that in the facebook age we are all becoming more like actors every day. But director Leos Carax isn’t confirming any of that, so after the channel surfing is over you’re left with not much more than what you brought with you. Reports of a ‘visual feast’ are exaggerated. Ironically the closest we get to one is the scene set inside a motion capture studio.

A couple of the vignettes are pretty good but mostly Holy Motors‘ overt strangeness fails to lift itself above simple perversity, and an overarching theme is possibly absent.