--- title: 'Holy Motors" Movie Review: Cinematic Masterpiece description: A Sleeper rises from his bed and, accompanied by his large dog, walks to a door and turns the lock. The door leads to the... canonical: https://time.com/archive/7120909/holy-motors-leos-carax-flirts-with-a-cinematic-masterpiece/ author: TIME Staff article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2012-10-19T15:07:14.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-03-16T05:57:11.804Z article:section: Entertainment og:title: 'Holy Motors': Leos Carax Flirts with a Cinematic Masterpiece og:description: This vaudeville of film history is the year's moviest movie og:url: https://time.com/archive/7120909/holy-motors-leos-carax-flirts-with-a-cinematic-masterpiece/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt166acf4af09a7611/698a8f83186892d0fc6cdd52/holy-motors.jpg?branch=production&width=600&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 600 og:image:height: 338 og:image:alt: Holy Motors og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: 'Holy Motors': Leos Carax Flirts with a Cinematic Masterpiece twitter:description: This vaudeville of film history is the year's moviest movie twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt166acf4af09a7611/698a8f83186892d0fc6cdd52/holy-motors.jpg?branch=production&width=600&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  * [Entertainment](/section/entertainment/) # 'Holy Motors': Leos Carax Flirts with a Cinematic Masterpiece > Sponsored content. 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Terms and conditions apply. * Savings buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Savings Account. * No ATM fees from Ally Bank at Allpoint and Moneypass ATMs plus we reimburse for fees charged by other ATM owners nationwide up to $10 per statement cycle. * Early direct deposit offers eligible direct deposits up to two days sooner. * Spending buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Spending Account. by [TIME Staff](https://time.com/author/time-staff/) Oct 19, 2012 3:07 PM UTC  Indomina Media by [TIME Staff](https://time.com/author/time-staff/) Oct 19, 2012 3:07 PM UTC A Sleeper rises from his bed and, accompanied by his large dog, walks to a door and turns the lock. The door leads to the balcony of a movie palace, whose audience watches a silent film as the dog patrols the aisles. The movie that follows could be the Sleeper’s dream or an eccentric synopsis of 130 yeas of cinema history, from the motion experiments of the French scientist Étienne-Jules Marey in the 1880s to today’s motion-capture digital technology. But Leos Carax’s _Holy Motors_, which astounded and outraged critics at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, is no sleepwalk; it’s an exhilarating trip of movie madness and sadness. Like David Cronenberg’s _Cosmopolis_, also in the Cannes Competition, _Holy Motors_ follows a man in a stretch limousine as he completes various appointments. The similarities end there, since Oscar (Denis Lavant, quirky star of nearly every Carax film) is lively and ready to try any “assignment” that his elegant chauffeur Céline (Edith Scob) hands him from “the agency.” Oscar might be a superspy, but he’s certainly an actor — perhaps The Actor. In the limo, which is large enough to house a makeup table and a considerable cache of artillery, Oscar prepares for the roles of a beggarwoman, a concerned father, a wistful lover, an old man on his deathbed (which he shares with the Sleeper’s dog) and the anarchic Monsieur Merde, a beast who kidnaps Eva Mendes from a glamour shoot in Père Lachaise cemetery for an interlude in his underground lair. At the end of a sequence Oscar pauses, in a miming of the actor’s “And scene!”, and discusses with his partner what their next gigs are. Art is always colliding with artifice here. **(READ: Richard Corliss’s review of** [**_Cosmopolis_** **at Cannes**](http://entertainment.time.com/2012/05/25/pretty-boys-gone-wild-part-2-robert-pattinson-in-cosmopolis/?iid=ent-main-cannes-film-festival-widget)**)** Carax, 51, made the heralded _Boy Meets Girl_ and _Bad Blood_ by the time he was 25, then marked time with just two more features, _The Lovers on the Bridge_ and _Pola X_, in his next quarter century. Now he enters a vigorous second prime. With a French father and an American mother (Joan Dupont, the longtime film journalist for the _International Herald Tribune_), Carax has the mix of movie cultures in his genes. _Holy Motors_ runs mad, hysterical, naked through Hollywood and continental film tropes: gangster pastiches, heavy melodrama and a big musical number, with Kylie Minogue singing the romantic ballad “Who Were We” as she and Alex wander to the roof of the abandoned Samaritaine department store. Throwing in a family of monkeys, talking limos and a raging erection for good measure, _Holy Motors_ slinks through Paris, its streets, sewers and rooftops, like the mysterious criminals in Louis Feuillade’s wondrous serials from a century ago: _Fantomas_, _Les Vampires_ and _Judex_. **(READ: Richard Corliss on** [**Louis Feuillade’s** **_Les Vampires_**](http://www.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,989303,00.html)**)** The director’s trek through film history has a special focus on the year of his birth, 1960 — when Piccoli got his first movie role; when Jean Seberg, of whom Minogue is an avatar, appeared in Jean-Luc Godard’s _Breathless_; and when Scob played the masked, disfigured daughter in Georges Franju’s _Eyes Without a Face_ (at the end she dons that mask). Like most traditional cinephiles, Carax suspects that film as we know it, and perhaps the moviegoing experience, is dead. When Oscar’s benefactor (Michel Piccoli), dropping into the limo for a chat, mentions that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, the actor replies, “And if there’s no more beholder?” Asked why, then, he continues his job, Oscar says, “For the beauty of the act.” He does it because he’s always done it, and because he does it so well. As Samuel Beckett wrote, “I can’t go on, I must go on.” And while this classicist-surrealist denounces the virtual world (the gravestones in Père Lachaise read, “Visit my website”) and demonstrates, through his film’s ravishing digital cinematography, that virtual can be voluptuous. Whatever else it is, Holy Motors is a two-hour product reel for its prodigious, protean star. “If Denis had said no,” Carax has said, “I would have offered the part to Lon Chaney or to Chaplin. Or to Peter Lorre or Michel Simon” (the last an inspirartion for the Monsieur Merde character). The director was being puckish; they’re all dead, and Lavant is his career-long alter ego. Carax might also have considered Andy Serkis, the dour-faced, acrobatic actor who, with the aid of movie technologies such a motion-capture, has played King Kong, Gollum and Caesar, the chimp who leads the _Rise of the Planet of the Apes_. Then this would have been a Serkis Circus. **(SEE: the** [**all-TIME Top 100 Movie List**](http://entertainment.time.com/2005/02/12/all-time-100-movies/#all)**)** At times the invention gets wearying; _Holy Motors_ might best be seen with pauses for reflection between each segment. But cinema and the adventurers remaining in its audience need the occasional movie that moves, explodes, exasperates, astounds and _Holy Motors_ does that. 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