Review of Holy Motors (2012) by Nick F — 30 Apr 2013

Many people will like this movie. They will say it is about life, art and the nature and boundaries of our self-expression. Perhaps it is about that, but not mostly. It is more about a day in the life of a person. We come out of sleep into an awareness of reality. We travel in bodies that are controlled by God or Fate on our varied errands. We pander for resources, we accomplish mental feats, carry out monotony. We have internal conflict, confront ourselves in the outside world, panic about our exposure to others, play our various roles, introduce ourselves to others in their various roles, and only very rarely meet others in lucid sincerity just to be crushed by their retreat into the deleterious roles that they play. We cannot go on, we linger in exhaustion and finally build the strength to go back home-to our dreams.

Holy Motors represents the self in the form of a man. The man changes roles and environments. He is pleased to accomplish some tasks and begrudgingly accomplishes others. He meets himself in the outside world and brings himself back to the seclusion of his inner experience. He wrestles with himself, murders his roles, makes mistakes, indulges in passion, and very rarely ventures into vulnerability with others outside of their previously established roles. In the end we interact with and are controlled by drivers whose very identities are a mystery outside our own consciousness. We do not even know by what force we are driven and we are anxious about the power such drivers have over us.

Thematically, Holy Motors wrestles with such deep and complex human experiences that the viewer depends on the eccentric nature of the movie to carry meaning to our feeble understanding of ourselves. We suspect that the masks the protagonist wears will reveal something about ourselves and the manner in which we relate to our presentations of ourselves in the real world. It doesn't and they don't. A man dresses up like an insane person, hobbles through a graveyard and bites off the fingers of a photographer's assistant. He has computer animated dragon sex with a nameless partner. He kills and is killed and reappears in his body with the help of his driver. He is old then young; agile then frail; violent then gentle; cruel then vulnerable; beaten then dominating.

"But isn't that the human experience?" its advocates will ask. No, it is not. I could gain more understanding about the human experience and with far more entertainment value by strapping a face-cam to many of the billions of people walking through a typical day in their sometimes mundane lives. Yes, we play all kinds of roles throughout the day. Yes, we are tired, excited, vulnerable and aggressive throughout the day. Yes, we wonder if anyone is watching anymore. But surely there is a better way to represent it than this. A film like this is great when it draws us out of our mental slumber and points us to things we had not noticed before. Holy Motors, I am afraid, will draw us out of our mental slumber only to scratch our heads and then retreat back to the comfort of sleep.