Holy terror, holy fool, holy shit! Holy Motors

He rises from bed in the night, steps over a dog, and carefully feels his way along an expanse of wallpaper—like May in her membranous motel room in Sam Shepard’s Fool For Love. He’s seeking a portal, perhaps to another dimension, perhaps just to a movie theatre, this man who, we’ll soon realize, can become anyone. (He’s played by who else but the inimitable, intensely physical actor Denis Lavant.) We call this man Monsieur Oscar, and once he finds his way through that papered wall and, it would seem, down some sort of rabbit hole, we then cut to the start of his workday, though surely Oscar’s strange activities, each of them supernatural feats of role-play for clients never identified and for purposes left obscure, should best be considered a vocation, or even a cosmic obligation.

In suit and tie, Oscar leaves his compound, cheerfully waves adieu to the kids, passes by his ample security staff, and enters his stretch limo, which is piloted by Oscar’s Girl Friday, a slim, ivory-haired, ravishingly beautiful septuagenarian (Edith Scob, most famous as the titular non-visage in the horror classic Eyes Without a Face). She alerts him to the day’s itinerary. Oscar prepares for each of his  gigs from his mobile office, which is equipped with a bulb-framed mirror, costumes and make-up. (Only Cosmopolis displays a car with more vital amenities.) First stop: Oscar disguises himself as a hunched-over old lady muttering to herself on a busy bridge. Soon after he’s donning a black full-body jumpsuit adorned with little white balls and entering a Tronosphere, where he meets a similar female creature in similar garb with whom he play-fights and faux-sexes with acrobatic panache. Is this already sounding weird? People, you all don’t know the half of it.

Maybe Monsieur Oscar is simply the world’s hardest working actor. Maybe, like the hapless hero of Ursula K. LeGuin’s novel The Lathe of Heaven, he’s simply trapped in an existence that morphs every time he turns around, and all he can do is adapt. Maybe Leos Carax, the compulsively inventive writer/director of Holy Motors, just wants to send Levant—his ferociously talented muse, Harpo Marx, Jacques Tati, Jackie Chan and Lon Chaney all rolled into one wiry, putty-faced Frenchman—on a paid holiday to an ever-unfurling dreamscape, made of one-part reality, one-part unconscious roaming, one-part cinephilia. There’s no road map for Holy Motors, so best do away with your search for clear answers from the get-go. You’ll have more fun that way.

For those who saw the recent anthology film Tokyo!, you’ll be pleased to discover that Carax has resurrected Levant’s milky-eyed, mayhem-making leprechaun, who this time around surfaces from a Paris sewer, gobbles cemetery flowers, bites the fingers off a fashion photographer’s assistant and abducts a zombified Eva Mendes from a glamour shoot. Later Oscar will enter an abandoned warehouse full of mannequin parts and meet up with Kylie Minogue, a fellow career changeling, or maybe a secret agent, from somewhere in his past, and she’ll sing a sad and powerful song that asks ‘Who Are We?’ The unbearable truth is that the answer just keeps changing, scene by scene, moment by moment, as does this luxuriant, restless, ultra-bizarre and hugely enjoyable film. Identity is fluid: this is a fact that also makes for great fantasy, a fantasies at the heart of movie-love. This movie understands that fantasy like few others do.  

     

Tokyo gall

This triptych sets each of its tales within the titular Japanese capital, but unlike similarly conceived recent tributes to Paris, New York and Toronto, the filmmakers arrive on the scene to reveal far more perverse invention than touristy affection toward their host city. Here, here! Tokyo!, now available on DVD from Liberation Entertainment, is no more a cohesive masterpiece than your average omnibus feature, but, helmed by two mischievous Frenchmen and a Korean—talk about courting contentious international relations—it is bold, strange, fun and occasionally thought provoking.

Transplanting Gabrielle Bell’s graphic novel Cecil and Jordan in New York to the other side of the planet, Michel Gondry’s ‘Interior Design’ finds a typical Gondry self-appointed creative genius hoping against the odds to make it big in the big, crowded city with his ramshackle, no-budget apocalypse disaster flicks—screened with smoke machines for that twee theatrical edge. The real protagonist here however is the fledging auteur’s girlfriend, played by Steven Segal’s daughter Ayako Fugitani, who by contrast is a sort of non-being, a person with no significant ambitions of her own. She eventually seems to vanish altogether in a surreal twist that’s best discovered in the moment. I enjoyed the film, but I couldn’t help but question Gondry’s subconscious motives and the ostensible inventiveness of creating this character of a Japanese woman who only finds herself by being transformed into the perfect object of servility.

Most memorable by far is Leos Carax’s ‘Merde,’ the director’s first film in a decade and a wildly caustic bit of politically hostile monster movie chaos. Everyone’s favourite nutcase Denis Lavant, who I'd like to nominate for an Oscar, crawls out of the Tokyo sewers like some demented offspring of a violent, racist French leprechaun and Harpo Marx driven insane by painful cataracts and years of living underground. In an opening sequence of inspired anarchy he terrorizes the local citizenry by gobbling cash and flowers, stealing smoking cigarettes and then tossing the burning butts into baby carriages. He’s finally captured and put on trial, defended by one of the only people on earth to speak his language—though once everyone knows what he’s saying this only serves to make the creature even more unsympathetic. He’s condemned to death, but monsters never die easily in the Japanese cinema, nor do martyrs of its bureaucratic processes (see Oshima’s Death by Hanging for the climactic sequence’s basis). Sequels are promised. Shit!

‘Shaking Tokyo,’ directed by The Host’s Bong Joon-ho and starring Tokyo Sonata’s wonderful Teruyuki Kagawa, is as obsessed with apocalypse as its predecessors, but is as sweet and sensitive as ‘Merde’ is grotesque and outrageous. Taking the national xenophobia under fire by Carax into a much quieter place, the film concerns a hikikomori—Japanese for shut-in—who’s solitary life of reading, shitting, sleeping and building orderly walls of pizza boxes and toilet paper rolls is interrupted by the possibility of love with a pizza delivery girl in danger of becoming just as reclusive as he is. The narrative naturally lends itself to a predictable climax of classical emotional liberation, but Bong, with great help from the tightly wound but finely expressive Kagawa, does a lovely job of making the journey distinctive and compelling.