Holy Motors (2012)

director Leos Carax
viewed: 04/01/2013

What is avant-garde nowadays?  What once referenced the frontal forces pushing culture beyond its standards… Is there any cinema truly avant-garde anymore?  Perhaps like the term “unique”, it’s something that has faded in its purest essence and come to be useful in this day and age as something to be appreciated in degrees.  I believe that there are degrees of uniqueness.   And perhaps there are degrees of “avant-garde”.  I guess that it would be true to say that in using these terms in this way, it diminishes by degrees those things that are truly unique and those things that truly acted as cultural vanguards.  But again, maybe that is just where we live in the present era.

Leos Carax’s Holy Motors is most certainly outside of the norm for a film.  It’s surreal, episodic, and bizarre.  Comparatively avant-garde.  It’s certainly far from the norm.

A man in a limousine is trekked around Paris and he transforms himself to play in a variety of roles at a set of appointments throughout the day.  The man is Denis Lavant and the artistry of his make-up, which he applies and removes between appointments extenuates his depiction as “an actor”.  Some of the vignettes are shorter than others, but the physical performances and transformations by Lavant are quite impressive.  While his first appointment is as an old beggar woman, his roles become more cinematic or perhaps more genre-specific.  The film opens in a mysterious sequence in which a man awakens in a room and finds a secret passage into a cinema.  So the question becomes: is this commentary on cinema?  on acting?  on Parisian life?  On roles in society?

The film’s tone is largely impish, though several sequences transcend into their own mini universes, some more profoundly than others.  In one sequence, he is a red-headed hunchback who captures Eva Mendes from a photoshoot.  Another he performs in a motion-capture suit, dazzling with physical feats in a darkened room.  Another he meets a fellow actor (Kylie Minogue) who is also traveling Paris by limo.  Is their interaction also a performance?  She breaks into song, though this was an unscheduled stop.

Holy Motors  made a lot of “best of” lists last year.  And it is quite remarkable in many ways.  Lavant is wonderfully chameleon-like in his transformations, and some pieces of the film seem to touch upon great fantasy.  I liked the movie.  I liked it quite well.  And I can kind of tell it’s going to be one of those films that sits in my brain for a long while as I come to a better sense of it overall.

The Night of the Hunted (1980)

director Jean Rollin
viewed: 08/09/2012

The Night of the Hunted is the first film I’ve ever seen by Jean Rollin, a cult erotic/horror French filmmaker.  Rollin’s name had been familiar to me over the years, but I became interested in seeing his films after reading about him on Atomic Caravan, which makes this the second film that I’ve seen from Scumbalina’s writings.  Netflix has been rather disappointing on the front of having the films that I’ve wanted to see available, so I chose The Night of the Hunted from what was available.  Many of Rollin’s fans are dismissive of this film for a variety of reasons.

The film opens as a beautiful blond, wearing only a nightgown, runs in front of a car on an isolated road.  The driver stops and takes her in.  She’s only semi-lucid, panicked and “hunted” but with a memory that blanks out almost entirely every few minutes.  She is hunted, it turns out, by a mysterious doctor and his gorgeous assistant.  Their methods and intents are so clandestine and ill-explained that even as the story develops, you’re never sure whether their version of events is in fact veritable.  They claim that due to an accidental exposure to toxic chemicals a group of individuals has developed degenerative cognizance and are being kept isolated to keep the public from finding out and freaking out.

Shot on a super low budget, the film is set among the foot of skyscrapers and desolate corridors.  The film is a mood piece, a tone poem perhaps, about isolation, interpersonal (dis)connection, memory loss, identity, and oppression and paranoia.  It has a haunting quality throughout, belying its cheap design, limited scope, and semi-professional actors (most of whom were “adult” film performers, whom Rollin had also filmed for movies in that industry).  Brigitte Lahaie somehow still comes off haunted and tragic.  The film’s ending, subtle and open, suggests some release from torment in death and dissolution.

I found it intriguing.  And haunting.  It’s one of those films that one ends up liking more than one should.  It’s not that it’s a great film, but it has something that captures an essence,evoking something harder to put into words.

Rubber

(2010) director Quentin Dupieux
viewed: 06/18/2011

The protagonist/anti-hero awakens, half-buried in sand in a godforsaken desert, unearths himself and wobbles forth. As he encounters things, first bottles and cans, he crushes and destroys them. He finds he has the psychic capability of making things explode, bunnies, birds, and more than anything else, human heads. And though he finds a lovely French girl to follow around, for pretty much the rest of the world, all he’s got is doom.

Did I mention that he’s a tire? A radial?

Written and directed by Quentin Dupieux, better known as Mr. Oizo, an electronic/techno musician, Rubber is more a ready-made cult film than any simple other genre reduction.  It’s sort of a horror film, sort of a comedy, not exactly a parody.  It’s absurdist.  Which is something that I typically can appreciate.

But Dupieux works the story from a “meta” angle, framing the whole thing from the first shot, in which Stephen Spinella, dressed as a police officer, climbs from the trunk of a slow-moving car that has carefully knocked over a series of chairs and addresses the audience directly, “breaking the wall,”  as it were.  His monologue, which reiterates the absurdity with explanations of how films often have things that happen for “no reason”, then shows that there is an audience within the film, watching and suffering from afar.

This is the film’s real weakness.  It moves from truly absurd to overly explained.  It’s like if you have to explain a joke, it’s no longer funny…

The film looks quite good, shot with a keen cinematographic eye on digital video, it’s aesthetically appealing, using analog effects, eschewing computer effects.  And Dupieux definitely seems to enjoy exploding  the heads of characters, showing several in gruesome detail.

But ultimately, it’s not as clever as it would like to be.  And ironically, I think if it just told its story in the straight-forward, unironic tonality of its interior narrative, it could have been somewhat sublime perhaps.  Who knows?