islandclimber
12-19-2012, 04:28 PM
This film... Did anyone manage to see it during festival season this past year? It closed out VIFF earlier this autumn. I've quite adored the films of Leos Carax ever since Boy Meets Girl with such brilliant performances from Denis Lavant and Mireille Perrier. His work reminds me of certain post-modern writers. Fragmented, surreal, wild, desolate, obsessed with the language of film. It's as though he took the lessons of the Nouvelle Vague, from Godard, Malle, Truffaut, and went a step beyond into something entirely new. For example, that scene in Boy Meets Girl, jumping between Mireille's tap dance in her apartment and Alex's wander through the late night streets, all to the sounds of early David Bowie (When I Live My Dream)... And then a pause as Alex stops to watch two lovers kiss on what looks like the Pont Neuf bridge (a frequent spot in Carax films), he searches his pocket, tosses some change at their feet. Then back to Mireille's dance. What a scene. What a gesture!
To return to Holy Motors, though, it seems like some feverish pastiche of all cinema, past, present, future, as though Carax has composed a haunting requiem for cinema itself. In literature it would be a collection of Borges stories, interlinked, yet disparate, or the mad and wild leaps of a Pynchon novel confined to a single city, on a single day. And Denis Lavant spins out what is surely the best performance of the year as he morphs from sewer-dwelling monster to assassin (and his victim), to slowly dying paternal figure, to virtual reality ninja-lover-serpent, to accordion maestro... Holy Motors, for me was the most transcendent new film experience of this current decade.
Thoughts?
To return to Holy Motors, though, it seems like some feverish pastiche of all cinema, past, present, future, as though Carax has composed a haunting requiem for cinema itself. In literature it would be a collection of Borges stories, interlinked, yet disparate, or the mad and wild leaps of a Pynchon novel confined to a single city, on a single day. And Denis Lavant spins out what is surely the best performance of the year as he morphs from sewer-dwelling monster to assassin (and his victim), to slowly dying paternal figure, to virtual reality ninja-lover-serpent, to accordion maestro... Holy Motors, for me was the most transcendent new film experience of this current decade.
Thoughts?