Movie : Holy Motors, or: The most extravagant one-note experience of your life
Link : Holy Motors, or: The most extravagant one-note experience of your life
Holy Motors, or: The most extravagant one-note experience of your life
Holy Motors (2012)
Directed by Leos Carax
***SPOILERS***
Holy Motors is seriously challenging an idea I thought would never cross my mind: is there such a thing as a great one-note film? I'll admit that "one-note experience" is a phrase I throw around all too often, although it's been warranted each and every time. God Bless America is a misunderstood film because people who hate Jersey Shore and NASCAR can all gather in the masturbatory experience of witnessing a Glenn Beck look-a-like having his head blown off via shotgun. Unfortunately, what they don't realize is that director Bobcat Goldthwait is more concerned with displaying how these killers' actions and complaints are no different or more humane than the people they obliterate. What Goldthwait didn't realize was that pointing out such a trait and actually exploring it are two different scenarios entirely. By continually resting upon the exchanged rants between Frank and Roxy and their contradicting nature, he never really says anything, taking the well-(and I mean WELL-)established motif and firing away until he was out of ammo.
But recently I was surprised by my own lone complaint of Jafar Panahi's This is Not a Film:
"The film's intentions are entirely too obvious. It doesn't have the chance to expand like (Panahi's) classic Crimson Gold, and instead sorta becomes this one-note experience about the artistically constricting nature of the Iranian government."
Despite my wholehearted attachment to this statement, my love for the "documentary" has not faded. It's an enlightening, intelligent, tragic commentary on the state of the oppressed filmmaking industry in Iran. But the approach used for the film was compiled in a matter of three days, resulting in several shots where Panahi repeatedly looks back upon his career and reflects on his current detainment. The method is also "one-note", as the manner in which Panahi depicts his separation from society through barriers: the fireworks and construction outside his window; the frustratingly slow-moving iguana trapped within the bookshelf; the television displaying a paused, claustrophobic moment in Crimson Gold. Separated from the streets Panahi has so endearingly explored throughout his entire filmography (he candidly notes at one point how rarely his films shift indoors), these barriers continually reinforce the same idea, making for a meta experience that can be easily spotted early within the film.
So, in all fairness, what makes This is Not a Film so different from God Bless America? I would say: there's framework in Panahi's repetitive approach. There's breakdown. There's volume in that final frame that brings the idea together. If we can compare the "pop culture rants" in God Bless America with the "barrier sequences" in This is Not a Film, we see variation and build-up in the latter. The variation within God Bless America exists solely with the subject matter of conversations: Roxy berates Diablo Cody (which is really just Goldthwait masturbating to Terry Zwigoff), but then continues to speak and act like one of her characters. Frank speaks of wanting to murder all the world's pedophiles, but then must fight off his own temptations for the underaged Roxy. It's the culmination and result of those conversations that will make the difference.
So how does each film end? For God Bless America, it's Frank and Roxy nodding to each other, blasting away Goldthwait's version of William Hung and the American Idol panel, and being shot down by the swarming SWAT team. After establishing the contradicting nature of Frank and Roxy's outlook for two hours, Goldthwait chooses a grandiose exit that somehow manages to pronounce none of previous material and instead send off the same, irreversible message in a fiery blaze. Confusing insightful social commentary with actual fucking work, Goldthwait undoubtedly pleases his fans with a hokey and obvious send-off that doesn't actually build on his go-for-broke idea. Panahi, on the other hand, ends his film conveniently just outside his apartment walls. Restrained from venturing outdoors, the temptations suddenly come together: the people he so lovingly captures in his films gathering for the fireworks; the crawling iguana unable to escape the confines of the living room; and then Panahi, stuck within a frame just like his character Hussein from Crimson Gold. So close to those fireworks just outside the walls, yet impossibly out of reach. Suddenly those barriers become more pronounced, and a precision to the progression of events can be traced.
So now, upon contemplation, my original question has sort of filtered out into this: is there such a thing as a one-note film? If there is, God Bless America is the closest example I can possible think of, and even that film attempts to vary its own banally insightful message. I guess I've found myself repeatedly (ironically enough) critiquing the method and its relation to the motif without concerning myself with the build upon an idea.
In that respect, Holy Motors has thrown me for one fuck of a loop. Despite my inherent concerns with its approach and isolated message, it's a film that constantly forces me to re-evalaute the connectivity of its own various genre-infused scenes—a sign, in my opinion, of a great film. The most grating realization about Holy Motors is that director Leos Carax realizes he's constructed a one-note experience. I mean, how more "one-note" can it get than an actor traveling to various sets to perform recycled scenes that define film's canon? But more than academic insight can possibly offer, Holy Motors is much more concerned with the aura of film (and, in turn, the nature of life) and the feeling any singular scene taken completely out of context can evoke. All at once it's both the beauty and problem with Holy Motors—a film that's all about coding and almost never about exposition, it's entirely consumed reinforcing an idea that's too dependent upon the audience's emotional reaction coinciding with one's comprehension of how loose the idea truly is. Spending time on the details of Holy Motors will only take the viewer in a giant circle leading back to the very same spot.
That's a strange statement coming from a guy who resonated with many of the film's scenes. In a sense, anybody who can appreciate the challenge of acting (especially in the face of Denis Levant's versatility) can recognize the power within each individual scene. But that's not the issue. It would be like if an extended episode of Saturday Night Live ran in theaters. SNL The Movie would be entirely concerned and dependent upon how often you laughed...kind of how the show currently operates (and fails at doing). SNL The Movie would move from scene to scene, with each scene connected to the next only based on the film's surface trajectory. Each scene is different and offers its own share of nuances, yet each scene continually reinforces the same idea and intends for the same level of comprehension. The idea behind the execution is never really flushed out or built upon, but instead stated with
Now my "emotional reaction" comment isn't in relation to the film's nuances and details within each scene. Certainly there are symbols and images that can be defined like any other film. My assessment is strictly concerned with Carax's scope, and his method in shaping that scope. My friend noted how The Turin Horse (a film I adore) treads dangerously close to this complaint, and I can certainly see the connection. Each consecutive day in The Turin Horse reinforces the same idea, the progression of events is entirely different from Holy Motors. While each day in The Turin Horse depicts the same events, it's the subtle changes to those events that shapes the singular tragic scope of the film: the bottle slowly empties; it becomes too windy to retrieve water; the horse dies; the daughter refuses to eat her potato. I would argue that, while each successive scene in Holy Motors offers up its own unique touches and nuances, none of the individual scenes actually builds on another. There's more of a fluid connectivity (the Kylie Minogue acknowledgement) that, much like The Turin Horse, continually reinforces a message.
The message associated with Holy Motors is firmly intact: the beauty of cinema rests within the moment. The emotion. The performance. And how we react to those moments is an important and defining aspect of film. Beginning his film with Oscar (Levant, basically playing himself) standing aside his tree-painted wall, Carax practically begs us to not just look at the individuals trees, but to respect his vision as a whole. So as Oscar opens a door and goes on to explore those individual trees, we are asked to abandon any sense of framework that's associated with the likes of This is Not a Film, and instead keep an open mind heading into each individual part of Holy Motors' whole. It's an expansive message that has no intention of building on itself thematically. It's more of an invitation into the mind of a frustratingly complex director who delivers his most straightforward film yet (by a long shot).
Although anybody can find beauty in a well choreographed sequence (that accordion scene...), Holy Motors strikes me as problematic because this idea is somewhat reliant on the viewer's knowledge of film. Not to say that anybody who hasn't seen Eyes Without a Face couldn't resonate with Edith Scob (playing Oscar's driver) placing a mask over her face as she struts out of the frame, but for the sake of performances dictating the broadness of Carax's vision, the limos' collective reaction to the performance displayed by their occupants is awfully reminiscent of an audience. Carax seems to realize that these performers are constantly under scrutiny and reliant upon their audience's reaction. M. Merde from makes a surprise (or is it?) return from Carax's sequence in Tokyo!, performing his own version of King Kong or Beauty and the Beast as he steals the striking Eva Mendes away and continues to strip her down to a golden burka. Does realizing these references play into one's appreciation of the film? Or maybe even the vaguest understanding of it?
Perhaps not. Carax said of his own film, "When I was editing the film I thought, 'this is like Chaplin’s Modern Times when he is stuck inside the machine, except there is no machine; it is invisible.'" Carax does not confine Holy Motors to the borders of film, but instead utilizes what is within those borders to break down any and all abstract barriers. A sort of inverse to the constricting nature of This is Not a Film, Carax is fixated on expanding his world and allowing Oscar to flush out into it, but never escape. He inadvertently plays puppeteer as director in a film he claims owns no thematic relation to cinema. He iterates that his film is about life, yet feels the need to not only infuse his film with various genre tropes, but also infuse Holy Motors with references to his own damn films. He both beckons and denies any tangible reading of the film, which led Ed Gonzalez of Slant to quote Jonathon Rosenbaum in declaring that Holy Motors is "dangerously close to being all notations and no text."
And so with that quote in mind, along with my own overused notion of "one-note" films, I have to ask: is that such a bad thing? A man says to Oscar, "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder," to which he responds, "But what if there is no beholder?" Oscar acts not only because it's his job, but because even though he has no audience, the performance is his passion. And it's this sense of passion that successfully fulfills Carax's wishes of making a film about life. It's an incredibly simple message that's staggeringly broad at the same time, to the point where all I can do is offer up an incredibly vague analysis that merely relates how Holy Motors makes me feel as a human being. For a one-note film that has no intentions of utilizing a traditional narrative or providing thematic clarity, that's all anybody can really do with this film. Carax is lucky enough that he has a bunch of cinephiles reacting to his work, as we've come to identify with all Carax's explored genres so profoundly that we can distinguish and contour this muted connection. Maybe I haven't yet been hardened by my ever-evolving relationship with film to find such a prospect to be an irreversible flaw. But, for now, it excites the living hell out of me.
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