Holy Motors (2012) – Blu-ray Disc

****/**** Image B Sound B- Extras B
starring Denis Lavant, Edith Scob, Eva Mendes, Kylie Minogue
written and directed by Leos Carax



Holymotors1click any image to enlarge

by Angelo Muredda It's no great shock that Holy Motors is innovative, coming from
the same headspace as The Lovers on the
Bridge
and Mauvais Sang–movies
that seemed fashioned out of whole cloth despite their indebtedness to names
like David Bowie and Herman Melville. What's most surprising is that beneath
the formal variety and cheekiness, mainstays of Leos Carax's freewheeling cinema,
is a moving and altogether serious exploration of what it means to be an actor,
in both a professional and a metaphysical sense. Carax's films have been ranked
among the boldest aesthetic manifestos since the 1980s for good reason, yet the
ineffable quality that distinguishes them from the superficially similar
grandstanding of nascent stylists like Xavier Dolan is their deep sincerity and
unabashed adoration of the eccentric city-dwellers who cross paths on the
loneliest roads in urban France. If Holy
Motors
is even wilder in presentation than its predecessors, then, it's
also perfectly legible within a body of work that's always found a human streak
in the avant-garde.

RUNNING TIME
115 minutes
MPAA
Not Rated
ASPECT
RATIO(S)

1.85:1 (1080p/MPEG-2)
LANGUAGES
French DD 5.1
SUBTITLES
English

REGION
A
DISC
TYPE

BD-25
STUDIO
Vivendi

While all of Carax's
films could be described as mad love letters to their fringe protagonists, here
that affection flows largely through the actors embodying them. In Denis
Lavant, the lithe, pug-faced trickster who's fronted all of the director's
pictures save Pola X, Carax has found something rather more than either a star or a muse. Lavant ostensibly plays
Oscar, a man who changes in and out of various costumes–and the identities
they evoke–while being chauffeured around Paris in a white limousine by driver
Celine (Edith Scob). But he's also Lavant, his distinctive face written into the
film's DNA despite the cosmetic changes that mark his tour through a host of
characters, ranging from a slick banker to a motion-capture performer in a suit
straight out of The Running Man. For
that matter, Scob is both the faithful driver and Scob herself, her storied
career imprinted on her body and, in one great moment, externalized via a prop
that points back to Eyes Without a Face.
And Kylie Minogue is at once another tired actor whom Oscar's limo brushes
against just before the working day is done and Kylie Minogue herself, her
voice unmistakeable in her lone musical number, partly because it's slyly
signposted earlier on as one of Oscar's personas hears "Can't Get You Out
of My Head" wafting from a party.

So powerful are those enduring indexical traces of performers' past
selves, particularly those reminders of the privileged relationship the camera
has always had to the human face, that one is constantly thrown by the movie's
protean structure, even though it unfolds more or less like clockwork. There's
a trace of the anthology film's voracious indulgence in multiple genres in the
way Oscar's assignments take him from playing a petty thug in a crime tragedy
to an old man in a TV melodrama that Carax frames like late Bergman. Yet it's
hard not to notice patterns across the performances, little signs that the
people Oscar plays cannot be discarded as easily as a latex nose. "I think
I caught a cold killing the banker," Oscar admits at one point, a
throwaway line that's typical of the picture's offhanded delicacy, its knack for
consistently locating the real pathos in its surreal premise. What could be more
inappropriate or touching than a chameleon given away by his nagging
cough?

Those eager to find an allegory for the death of cinema in these recurring
nods to the authentic kernel that lies within even the most contrived
performances will rightly note Carax's emphasis on the mechanics of Oscar's
work–his reliance on the most lumbering and inelegant of motor vehicles to arrive at
his many face-to-face encounters. That this is Carax's first digital feature is
difficult to ignore. "Some don't believe what they're watching
anymore," laments Oscar's spectral boss (Michel Piccoli), and it's hard
not to take Oscar's rejoinder, that it's a challenge for an actor to believe in
his performance when the cameras he acts before are "smaller than our
heads" now, as a nostalgic ode to celluloid, may it rest in peace.

But the beauty of Holy Motors–and
indeed, Oscar justifies his work on account of "the beauty of the
act"–lies in its tempered stance between that nostalgia and a mild
hopefulness for what's to come. Oscar isn't just yearning for performances
past: Tired as he is, he's game to face whatever instruction comes down to him
in his next manila envelope. Nowhere is that clearer than in his last two
assignments, an old man's death-bed confessional and its immediate sequel–the
sad, roaming duet with Minogue that proves his steps are still nimble even as
his hair remains thinned and powdered white (like a rakish Jacques Derrida)
from the previous performance. That pas
de deux
ends with a moment of grace that encapsulates the film's generous
appraisal of Oscar's work, its falseness notwithstanding. Sneaking back to the
limo after his character has just died in the arms of his niece, he pauses to
ask the young woman her real name. "Thank you, Elise," he tells her,
addressing not only the character who's just authentically mourned him but also
the actress, actually named Elise Lhomeau, who's touched him with her
performance. Carax extends the same courtesy to Lavant, and anyone struggling
to get a grip on this slippery film would do well to start there.

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THE BLU-RAY DISC
by Bill Chambers The leap from non-anamorphic PAL-to-NTSC
DVD with a permanent, subtitles-obscuring watermark–which is how I first saw Holy
Motors
–to Blu-ray is so profound that I'm in a position to be more
forgiving of Vivendi's BD release of Holy Motors. Unlike its European
counterpart(s), as well as most Blu-rays manufactured after 2007, the
disc utilizes an MPEG-2 codec, which was quickly recognized as being fine for
broadcast but beneath the potential of next-gen media. Though it's likely the
1.85:1, 1080p transfer would have a little more snap with different/superior
encoding (not to mention a broader bitrate, as the movie occupies a scant 14GB
of a 25GB platter), I suspect a certain flatness of latitude, at least, is by
design: It makes sense for Oscar to kind of float through a void. (What's more
maddening is that the supplementary material is encoded in AVC/MPEG-4.) Holy Motors
was shot with the Red Epic–chosen, if I'm parsing the special features
correctly, for its compactness; the original idea was to use DV, as director
Leos Carax and DP Caroline Champetier had on Tokyo!, so clarity may not
have been their primary concern. Nevertheless, this is a handsome, almost
classically-shot film by no means dishonoured by this basically glossy and
well-compressed presentation. More disappointing is the lossy DD 5.1
track–it's fine, but the picture has a fairly hemispheric mix to start with, and it
could sorely use the added depth of Master Audio.

Extras begin with "Drive In: The Making of Holy
Motors
" (47 mins., HD), which includes a lengthy Kylie Minogue
interview somewhat gratuitously spun off into its own accompanying featurette
(13 mins., HD). I guess she's a marketing hook? Champetier, Minogue, and actor
Denis Lavant do most of the talking in the making-of, though Edith Scob says a
few words and so does Carax, via onscreen text. (He reveals the inspiration behind Oscar's hunchbacked beggar.) While it's not the latchkey to
the movie's riddles a viewer might wish for, it does have a European
deliberateness to it that's a refreshing change of pace from flashy American
EPKs, even if some comments border on press junket-worthy. (That it's hard to
work with chimps isn't the most penetrating observation Lavant could've made
about the scene in question.) Minogue, for her part, is luminous–is there an aging
portrait of her rotting away in a basement somewhere?–and seemingly on the verge of
tears at all times. She really responded to the role of Jean, originally written
for Juliette Binoche in direct homage to Lovers on the Bridge. Domestic
and international trailers for Holy Motors (both in 1080p) round out the
BD, while a crapload of previews–for The Imposter, Wasted on the
Young
(hey neat, they cloned Michelle Williams), Flying Swords of Dragon
Gate
, Life Without Principle, Luv, and Filly Brown–cue
up on startup. For what it's worth, there's a substantial lagtime between pop-up menu screens.

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