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| High praise and an evocative night scene captures the imagination on this poster for Leos Carax's Holy Motors |
Monsieur X works out of a limousine, which drives around Paris, to nine different meetings, he is to have. And in each meeting he plays a new character.
Holy Motors is written and directed by great French filmmaker Leos Carax (Boy Meets Girl (1984)).
A strange and eccentric story, which has fun teasing and playing with us as audiences in different ways, (for instance by leading us to believe that meetings may be over when they're not), Holy Motors appeals strongly to the imagination. It works basically as a fun, infantile fantasy over what a working day full of meetings could actually consist of; or more seriously, if you will, as a reflection over how life consists of meetings and memories, which can seem obscure in hindsight, and of a constructed self-identity, which is in reality fluid and an abstract thing that is altered through our various meetings.
Holy Motors is also quite funny and filled with lots of striking ideas, a pair of excellent musical numbers, - including an elegantly filmed sequence with Kylie Minogue (Swinging Safari (2018)) singing Who Were We? (by Carax, Neil Hannon and Andrew Skeet) and her own biggest hit as a pop singer Can't Get Your Out of My Head, - a sequence that is reminiscent of Catherine Deneuve in Jacques Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg/Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (1964). Minogue both acts and sings fabulously. Denis Lavant (Gagarine (2020)) is wholly invested as the fascinating, wiry protagonist, and the film's hair and makeup department have worked wonders here.
Holy Motors is a playful and artistic work of splendor.
Watch a trailer for the film here
Cost: 4 mil. $
Box office: 4.2 mil. $ - some uncertainty
= Huge flop (returned 1.05 times its cost)
[Holy Motors premiered 23 May (Cannes Film Festival, in main competition) and runs 116 minutes. Carax preceding film was Pola X (1999), and he had attempted to find funding for a big English-language film for 5 years prior to Holy Motors, which came about as an alternate construction instead of the big foreign film, which he did not find funding for. 14 companies and support bodies cooperated in its financing and production. Shooting took place from September - November 2011 in France, including in Paris. The film opened #62 to an 18k $ first weekend in 2 theaters in North America, where it peaked at #44 and in 29 theaters (different weekends), grossing 641k $ (15.3 % of the total gross, the film's 2nd biggest market). The film's Box Office Mojo and The-numbers.com pages differ, with the latter listing an erroneous 1.7 mil. $ gross from Denmark, which likely should have been listed as from France, most likely the film's biggest market (40.5 %). The 3rd biggest market was the UK with 373k $ (8.9 %). The film lost the Palme D'Or to Michael Haneke's Amour. It was nominated for 9 César awards, among many other honors. Roger Ebert gave the film a 3.5/4 star review, equal in rating to this one. Carax returned with Gradiva (2014, short) and theatrically with Annette (2021). Lavant returned in L'Étoile de Jour (2012); Edith Scob (Wicked Game (2016, TV movie)) in 5 shorts and one voice performance before her theatrical physical return in Les Yeux Jauned des Crocodiles (2014). Holy Motors is certified fresh at 92 % with am 8.20/10 critical average at Rotten Tomatoes.]
What do you think of Holy Motors?
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