Beautiful, bold and bonkers: French auteur Leos Carax shot to the front of the Cannes race on Wednesday with a wild ride of a film featuring jamming accordionists and a flame-haired troll.
Carax’s “Holy Motors” — which features Kylie Minogue and Eva Mendes in bit parts — drew hollering applause, and quite a few boos, at a press screening ahead of its red-carpet premiere that ignited a storm of critical debate.
A wacky parable on life’s futility, the film traces the journey of a man who slips actor-like into shifting identities through the course of a day, changing in a stretch limo chauffeured by his ageing but impeccable secretary Celine.
“It’s a film about a man and about an experience, the experience of being alive,” Carax said of the feature film, his first after a 13-year break and one of 22 racing for the Riviera event’s Palme d’Or top prize.
“He is a kind of actor, a bit like all of us, that no one is watching.”
The weather-beaten French actor Denis Lavant stars in no fewer than 11 roles, from a corporate boss to a stooped old beggar woman, a dying old man, a crazed goblin or the frontman of a boisterous accordion band.
Lavant, who has worked with Carax for three decades, said he approached the script like a “musical score.”
The result is a succession of tableaux by turns serious, moving, erotic or laugh-out-loud loopy, like one in which the flower-munching, goateed troll carts off a fashion model played by Mendes to his underground den.
One of the most striking sequences features a duo in motion-capture suits miming an acrobatic, body-bending sex scene.
When Carax’s shape-shifter finally returns home, it is to a wife and child played by bonobo apes.
Asked for some clues to the film, the shade-wearing Carax told reporters without a blush that he makes his movies for himself.
“Who is the public? All I know is it’s a bunch of people who will be dead very soon,” the 51-year-old replied in English. “I don’t make public films, I make private films.”
Pressed to explain the troll sequence — which sees a grunting, goateed imp clothe Mendes in a makeshift burqa before lying, aroused and naked, on her lap — Carax replied: “How would I know?”
In the notes to the film, Carax said the troll — dubbed “Mr Merde” (Mr Shit) — was an archetype intended to embody “fear and phobia” and a regressive spirit that he saw taking root after the September 11 attacks in 2001.
The spark for the movie, Carax told reporters, came from crossing the path, day after day, of a beggar woman.
“It occurred to me that I could have been her, I could have been driven here to change into her clothes in a cafe toilet,” he said.
The title “Holy Motors,” he said, referred to the waning place of the engine in an increasingly virtual world.
Minogue — who was introduced to Carax by a mutual friend — plays a small role as a fellow shape-shifter whose latest assignment is to embody an air hostess about to commit suicide.
“Yes, it’s a bizarre meeting of us two,” Kylie agreed when quizzed about the tie-up with Carax. “But I was more than happy and excited to venture into this strange experience.”
However opaque for the viewer, the movie emerged as a critical favourite with Britain’s The Guardian describing it as “weird and wonderful, rich and strange — barking mad”.
“Exhilarating, opaque, heartbreaking and completely bonkers,” was how the Hollywood Reporter summed up Carax’s movie.
“It’s brave and foolish,” wrote the magazine, saying the film “immediately bolts to the front of the pack in the race for the Palme d’Or and into an elated tempest of debate and speculation.”
Bold and baffling 'Holy Motors' takes Cannes for a ride
