Beau Travail

BEAU TRAVAIL        A          
France  (93 mi)  1999  d:  Claire Denis 

With banners furled, and clarions mute,

An army passes in the night,

And beaming spears and helms salute,

The dark with bright.

In silence deep the legions stream,

With open ranks, in order true;

Over boundless plains they stream and gleam–

No chief in view!

Afar, in twinkling distance lost,
(So legends tell) he lonely wends
And back through all that shining host
His mandate sends. 

—The Night March, Herman Melville from Timoleon,1891 

Gold in the mountain

And gold in the glen

And greed in the heart

Heaven having no part

And unsatisfied men.

—Gold in the Mountain, Herman Melville from The Works of Herman Melville, 1924

This film grew out of a French TV commission when Denis was approached by ARTE, the most culturally progressive European TV channel, and asked to make a film for a series exploring the theme of “foreignness.”  This is the same company that earlier asked Denis and others, namely Chantal Akerman, Olivier Assayas, COLD WATER (1994), and André Téchiné, WILD REEDS (1994), to make films about adolescence, which resulted in the one-hour made-for-French-TV film U.S. GO HOME (1994).  “Since most of my films deal with that anyway, I worried about how I could avoid repeating myself.”  Having spent her early childhood in colonial French Africa, then moving to the Paris suburbs at age 13, she never felt like she belonged in either place, growing up feeling alienated.  Loosely based on Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, though altering the themes and ultimately the outcome, including carefully chosen excerpts of music from the Benjamin Britten opera, Denis has transposed the ship’s setting to a postcolonial French Foreign Legion outpost in the desert regions of Djibouti, Somalia, one of the places her family lived in the 50’s, so she already had a familiarity with the region.  Shot in just 15 days, what’s so remarkable about the film is the extreme originality, the indirect way of telling the story, reflecting the bad conscience of the colonial occupying power, as almost immediately one detects a solidly abstract visual expressionism, where the near wordless film becomes an intoxicating choreography of ritualized movement, as the group of fifteen muscular men do shirtless calisthenics in formation under the emptiness of the blistering desert sky, drenched with male eroticism and cast in the form of a languorous tropical dream, where a theme of rootless and abandoned men who otherwise have no home adapt to the rigid discipline of the legion.  Perhaps more importantly, Denis hired a choreographer, Bernardo Montet (who also plays one of the French legionnaires), transforming the film into a series of carefully constructed scenes, providing a near surreal structure, intentionally blurring the lines between illusion and reality.     

A taut psychological exploration of the increasingly antagonistic relationship between a Foreign Legion officer, Lieutenant Galoup (Denis Lavant), and a charismatic new recruit, Gilles Sentain (Grégoire Colin), Galoup narrates the tale in voiceover, where he is fanatically loyal to his commanding officer Bruno Forestier, Michel Subor, who previously played Bruno Forestier 37 years earlier in Godard's LE PETIT SOLDAT (1963) which was set during the Algerian War, actually banned for three years in France prior to the release due to the presence of torture scenes, where Forestier is now much older, seen with a chiseled face, sitting alone from the rest of the men, constantly smoking cigarettes.  The Denis film offers a revisionist perspective by actually engaging in a conversation with that earlier film through a shared character.  But when new recruits arrive, Galoup expresses extraordinary vehemence towards the especially attractive Sentain, especially after Forestier has taken an immediate liking to him, overly insecure and threated perhaps by his own noticeable lack of good looks.  Galoup's jealousy, like Othello, literally drives him to murderous insanity.  With a minimum of dialogue, Denis captures the ritual and repetition of a legionnaire’s life, expressed through beautifully ordered compositions of the men during various maneuvers, crawling under barbed wire, vaulting over bars, walking across elevated parallel wires, marching in formation across the desolate landscape, while also engaged in hand to hand combat.  The homoeroticism of the military experience rises to the forefront from the beauty of the visual composition, but also from the inner workings of Galoup’s mind, as he expresses his love of Forestier (carrying around a photo of him as a younger man) and a growing rage against Sentain.  While the legionnaires come from all races and hues, the film raises questions about the relationships of whites to blacks, especially given the perspective of a former French colony, highlighted in scenes where the men go into town on leave and dance with the local women, where one particular local beauty, Rahel (Marta Tafesse Kassa), seems to be the exclusive girl of Galoup, though he treats her paternalistically, as his primary interest remains Forestier.  While the setting is Africa, the atmospheric mood is one of reverie, spending hot dusty afternoons in the sun, where the monotony of the experience can overwhelm the legionnaires.  The voiceover is actually recalling events from a diary in a flashback mode, offering a ruminating calm, even as Galoup’s plans grow more inflamed, where his desire is more potent precisely because it remains unconsummated.

Denis creates a sensuous atmosphere not only with perfectly composed images, but the dramatic power never diminishes between major and minor events, often contrasting close ups with long shots, blending music and natural sound into her film, where she’s not afraid to use silences to match the spacious emptiness all around.  What’s perhaps most surprising, despite the focus on the men, is how carefully layered women are into the landscape, becoming a kind of Greek chorus, where their silent presence is everywhere, amusingly seen staring at the men as they carefully wash and iron their clothes, lining the street markets selling their goods, or seen sitting in the buses riding through the endless landscapes.  When the legionnaires stream into town on leave, they’re seen dancing at the local nightclub with native women, exchanging physical embraces, but rarely words.  The film opens and closes on the dance floor, where the whole film unravels like continual dance sequences, where even in their silence the women are an integral and necessary part of a dance ritual, but their presence is hauntingly ambiguous, silent witnesses, suggesting a potentially unhealthy relationship with the postcolonial presence of the soldiers, who may not be so welcome in the region.  According to Denis, “You always have a moment in life when you’d like to start from zero.  The Foreign Legion is a place where boys go to do that, where people who have no place to go can find a kind of family, especially because they're not asked what they did before.  The legionnaires became an erotic object in film and song—Edith Piaf’s song ‘Mon Legionnaire’ is one of her most famous—but when I saw them walking in the street or going to clubs, their beauty was more sad to me than erotic.  You could see that the Legion is about men together.  These boys who never belonged before now belong to one another.  It’s very touching.”  Tribute to Beau Travail YouTube (8:15), featuring the opening dance sequence with African girls in a disco to “Şimarik (Kiss-Kiss)” by Tarkan (0 to 1:24), calisthenics with a Benjamin Britten chorale (1:25 to 2:25), more unscored calisthenics, (2:25 to 3:45), dance sequence with Rahel (Marta Tafesse Kassa) to Francky Vincent “Le Tourment d’Amour” (3:45 to 4:30), more unscored calisthenics (4:30 to 5:23), march in formation to Neil Young’s “Safeway Cart” (5:23 to 6:50), Denis Lavant final dance sequence up to the end credits to Corona “Rhythm of the Night” (6:50 to 8:15), while this extends the throbbing dance music through the final credits, singing almost in defiance, “This is the rhythm of my life, my life,” CD Beau Travail YouTube (4:59).

The full force of the film took critic Jonathan Rosenbaum by such surprise that he had to admit “I must confess that I’m embarrassed by most of my other reviews of Claire Denis films,” claiming the difference between this film and her earlier work “is quite simply the difference between making movies and making cinema,” comparing it to the quantum leap taken by certain exalted artists like Robert Johnson or Charlie Parker in blues and jazz.  Some of the glorified images of male bodies during training exercises or on maneuvers are comparable to the idealized images of farmers harvesting the fields in Dovzhenko’s EARTH (1930), Eisenstein’s visually astounding battle scenes in ALEXANDER NEVSKY (1938), or the glorified sweep of perfectly sculpted battle formations in Jancsó’s THE RED AND THE WHITE (1967) or Kurosawa’s RAN (1985).  While the history of cinema is filled with beautiful young women in various shades of undress being leered at by gawking male directors, male bodies have come under scrutiny before as well, where the term homoerotic suggests it was largely under the gaze of male directors, where the names Derek Jarman or Pier Paolo Pasolini come to mind, or Todd Haynes’s Poison (1991), or Fassbinder’s QUERELLE (1982), which has a similar doomed love theme between a superior older officer and a gorgeous looking young sailor.  What’s unique here is how rare it is to find similar themes of male bodies visualized so artistically under a woman’s gaze, including the director and her lifelong cinematographer Agnès Godard, where you may have to go back to Leni Riefenstahl’s OLYMPIA (1938) for a similar comparison, where one suspects every single German cameraman in 1938 was male.  If one examines art history, women have typically been systematically excluded from art training, and this argument is raised every year at the Cannes Film Festival as to why there are so few female directors represented in competition, if any.  Only the names of Agnès Varda or the more literary Marguerite Duras are included in the French New Wave, which otherwise produced all male directors, where women were more likely to appear in front of the camera.  With alternating images of stark despair and staggering beauty, the suggestion here is not only is it rare, but from women directors it may be unsurpassed aesthetically.       

The Lovers of Pont-Neuf (Les Amants du Pont-Neuf)

THE LOVERS OF PONT-NEUF (Les Amants du Pont-Neuf)        A                    

France  (125 mi)  1991  d:  Léos Carax 

Only recently released, seven years in the making, the film has taken on legendary status for a multitude of reasons, long considered one of the best of the decade, yet never seen.  The Pont-Neuf bridge crossing over the Seine River is one of the most beloved historical landmarks in Paris, but based on Carax’s passion for certain kinds of shots, and the length of time needed for the production, Carax decided he couldn’t shoot there, and instead erected in the South of France a two-thirds replica of the famous bridge and the neighborhood surrounding it.  The production was halted several times, but resumed because of the interest of the star, Juliette Binoche, who was Carax’s lover at the time.  The whole thing took three years and ended up costing $28 million, the most expensive French production in history, but a mere pittance by U.S. standards, for which Carax risked his career to realize his vision.  Having now seen the film, one would have to say it was well worth the risk, as it blends the authentic with the fantastic, mixing documentary style naturalism with exaggerated film extravagance to create a great urban expressionist fantasy.  Yet despite the extraordinary style of the film, much of it realized by the superb camera of Jean-Yves Escoffier, the subject matter matches the visual intensity, using the city’s physical characteristics to poetically reflect the consciousness of its characters.

Opening with a documentary portrait of the homeless in Paris, then centering on two homeless lovers who mentally and physically are a wreck to look at, they live on a dilapidated bridge that is under construction.  The woman, Michèle (Juliette Binoche), is going blind and wears a patch over one eye, while the man, Alex (Denis Lavant), a former circus performer walks with a limp, as we are witness to a car running over his leg early in the film.  Both appear wretched and filthy, like weary decrepit souls living on the outer fringes of the world, so the story delves into what’s inside and cannot be seen, their love story evolving into an incredibly rich fantasy life, culminating in the most unimaginably spectacular fireworks display, the sky ablaze with explosions bursting over the lovers on the bridge, both delirious with joy, unable to keep their bodies from dancing under this deluge of delight, continuing the fireworks fantasia by water skiing down the River Seine, explosions like birthday candles and sparklers bursting all around them, bathing them both in streams of light, a wonderfully powerful and ecstatic vision from such tragically bleak and battered lives.

The film is reminiscent of another French film yet to be made, Olivier Assayas’s Cold Water (L’eau Froide) (1994), which is sort of a teen version of delinquents on the run searching through unimaginable depths of their souls for love and salvation, featuring a brilliant bonfire scene.  There’s a tugging reminder of Chaplin’s CITY LIGHTS (1931), and the ending, when both rekindle the love in their hearts in an underwater scene pays homage to Jean Vigo’s underwater love fantasy sequence in L'Atalante (1934), using a similar barge down the river.  Unfortunately, the commercial epic TITANIC (1997) also ripped off what otherwise would be one of the more memorable images of the film, the two lovers in each others arms on the bow of the barge.  This mental reference to commercialism is an unwelcome reminder to how much imagery is literally stolen in art, a maddening thought that unfortunately comes during the very climax of this film.  

Another disturbing thought that continuously haunts the viewer afterwards is the reprehensible behavior of Alex, the manipulating and conniving male lover in the film, certainly a tortured soul in his own right.  It is impossible not to be reminded of that, where one realizes these are homeless people who live on the verge of the irrational, a separate universe from our own, but it turns out the coldest, bleakest, most hideous aspect of the film is his purposeful act to keep her blind, to keep her helpless and homeless, to maintain her need for him at all costs, no matter the price.  One can’t help but think of the cliché, love is blind, I would do anything for love, but this is such a typical, self-serving act of male misogyny on such a high order that it is impossible not to shiver with disgust.  One must ask themselves, what is that doing in this film?  And we’re left to believe that urban homelessness on the deteriorating bridge stands for the state of moral decay, the crumbling of what was once the pillars, the foundation of society, signs of a deteriorating moral order that leaves us with the Neanderthal cave man who has always been there, but has now disguised himself in civilization with clean pants and a close shave.  Leave it to the French to describe:  woe is me, what a weary state is man.  Despite the fact the bridge can be rebuilt, the love rekindled, the homelessness and decay remain, even if it’s not seen.  It’s almost as if Carax is saying, only in your imaginations can you be free, as the world and the people in it care nothing about you.  And we are left with this troublesome thought at the end of this hauntingly intense and beautiful film rather than caught up in the rapture of romance, quite a bleak contrast from the wondrous optimism of the Vigo film.

Mauvais Sang (Bad Blood)

MAUVAIS SANG (Bad Blood)          A                    

aka:  The Night Is Young

France  (116 mi)  1986  d:  Léos Carax 

Do you believe in love that comes quickly, that strikes quickly, but which lasts forever?    

—Alex (Denis Lavant)

A gangster film told using bold primary colors which, like his earlier film Boy Meets Girl (1984), is another modern take on the irrepressibility of romanticism that so often leads to the impossibility of love.  Made when Carax was having an affair with Juliette Binoche, this is largely written for her, as it is another dreamlike idealization of forbidden love.  While many of the French New Wave films dealt with the anguish of love, where Truffaut’s work in particular is full of pain, loss and unrequited love, more seemed inspired by the existential angst of modern youth, filled with carefree moments of risk taking and rebellion, often leading to heartbreak and senseless tragedy, where Godard’s BREATHLESS (1960), BAND OF OUTSIDERS (1964), or PIERROT LE FOU (1965) spring to mind.  While Carax was obviously inspired by these early Nouvelle Vague films, his real interest seems to be Silent films, where like Guy Maddin, his central focus is examining the hidden layers under the surface, often revealed through an experimental or surrealist visual style that uncovers darkly contained fantasies or fears.  One of the unsung gems of 1980’s cinema, what Carax brings to the screen is an explosion of raw emotion, shot once more by Jean Yves Escoffier, but rather than the morbid black and white obsession of his earlier effort, he uses color as an extension of emotional discovery, where a seductive thread runs throughout the film, as the story follows the romantic exploits of the director’s alter-ego Alex (Denis Lavant).  Initially Alex is smothered by the love of a beautiful young teenage girl Lise, Julie Delpy in one of her earliest film appearances, who remains infatuated with him even as he attempts to abandon her, literally running away at first, hoping to get a new start in life.  But in his head, Lise is a constant presence, like the picture of innocence, where she never really goes away, and he continues to address her throughout the film in dreams and voiceovers. 

One of the more intriguing aspects of the opening is Alex’s answering machine which plays the bombastic opening theme of Prokofiev Romeo and Juliet Dance of the Knights YouTube (3:17).  The film quickly delves into a film noir thriller populated by underworld characters, but only out of reverence to an earlier era of cinema.  After receiving word his father has been killed under mysterious circumstances, perhaps by the American, the aging and decrepit looking Carroll Brooks from his previous film, Alex falls in with his father’s old gang, led by Michel Piccoli as Marc, a father figure who remembers him as a child, when he interestingly refused to talk, preferring to remain silent, developing the nickname “Tongue Tied.”  The first glimpse of Anna (Binoche) is on a bus, where emotions are elevated through a surge in symphonic music, a complete stranger that catches Alex’s eye, seen through reflected images, while the next time she is all shadows and light expressed through German Expressionist imagery.  When they finally meet, she appears like an apparition draped in red, a kind of porcelain doll that suddenly comes to life, where a young Binoche has never looked more innocently fragile or as splendidly beautiful, but she is the girlfriend of Marc, easily twice her age.  There is the barest outline of a story with Marc masterminding a criminal heist requiring the services of Alex, a street hustling cardshark whose quick and nimble hands can crack open a safe, actually taking his father’s place, where they amusingly must learn to parachute.  At the airport, Marc greets Serge Reggiani, playing a pilot named Charlie in the movie, who is interestingly introduced with Marc by greeting one another in a Silent era vaudeville routine.  Marc pushes to the point of browbeating Anna to jump out of the plane, clearly against her wishes, but she does it anyway, where she eventually faints, rescued by Alex in a fascinatingly shot air sequence shown here:  Mauvais Sang (Leos Carax, 1986) - Parachuting  YouTube (3:37). 

Rather than follow the crime, Carax instead follows the romantic attraction of Alex and Anna, easily the most compelling aspect of the movie, becoming the emotional center of the picture.  This is all set in motion in a masterful sequence with Alex now hopelessly in love, opening with Serge Reggiani (the pilot seen earlier) heard on the radio singing “J'ai pas d'regrets (I regret nothing),” followed almost immediately by David Bowie’s “Modern Love,” Mauvais Sang YouTube (4:10), in what is easily the shot of the film, where Denis Levant, as if shot by Cupid’s arrow, streaks down the street in an endlessly long tracking shot, stumbling, cart-wheeling, eventually breaking out in a full sprint, where the buildings and lampposts go by in a blur of sheer exhilaration, one of those giddy outbursts of spontaneous emotion, running as if trying to take flight and be free.  When he returns to her, she reminds him she’s in love with Marc, remaining unattainable, but the two are still infatuated with one another, unable to say goodnight or let go, offering lengthy monologues of dreamlike nocturnal yearnings.  In Anna’s world, it grows slowly surreal where the phone rings, but there’s no sound, or she speaks and her mouth moves, but there’s still no sound, yet with Alex his voice sounds so rapturously lyrical.  In another romantic surge, to the music from Chaplin’s LIMELIGHT (1952), Mauvais Sang (Leos Carax, 1986) - Baby Steps YouTube (5:21), Mireille Perrier, the star of his earlier film, appears in a dreamlike sequence where Alex mimics the wobbly steps of her baby.   After a brief kaleidoscope of color, the screen turns silent, reassembling all the various players in the film in a powerfully original Silent era montage, a return to innocence, where Carax has a special fondness for close-ups and gestures, not to mention an underlying melancholy in silence.  MAUVAIS SANG is a hauntingly beautiful film, one where we never truly comprehend the depth of the relationships, where Carax equates the love for a woman with the possibilities of cinema itself, where like his first film, mood pervades every shot, often with a lush romanticism pre-dating Wong Kar-wai, who hadn’t really defined himself until his films of the 90’s.  But the visual expression and stylized composition in this film often veer toward moments of ecstasy, including the final shot, another lengthy sequence where running continues to suggest the possibilities of flight, freedom, escape, or perhaps even a metamorphosis.    

Boy Meets Girl

BOY MEETS GIRL                 B    
France  (100 mi)  1984  d:  Léos Carax 

A sad and overly melancholic film, featuring indulgent and completely self-absorbed characters, yet beautifully shot in Black and White on the streets of Paris by Jean Yves Escoffier, but the film suffers from over-stylization, where the impressive cinematic technique on display completely dwarfs the bleak portrait of humanity, filled with downbeat and excessively brooding characters that drift through the mysterious landscape of their empty lives, characters so alienated from the world around them that suicide is a prevalent theme.  Denis Lavant begins his journey in Carax films as the director’s impulsive alter-ego, reappearing in each of his first three films as Alex, excluded for some reason from POLA X (1999), easily the director’s biggest failure, and then resurfacing again in Holy Motors (2012) as Mr. Oscar, assuming the director’s middle name.  A nocturnal film taking place almost entirely over the course of one night, the film begins with Alex abandoned by his girlfriend, where his mindset is unstable to say the least, showing a violent tendency that nearly leads to murder, directed towards the friend his girlfriend left him for, but instead he soon becomes infatuated by another girl who has also just broken up with her boyfriend, Mireille (Mireille Perrier, the director’s girlfriend at the time), who is seen more as an illusion than someone real.  In fact, it’s hard to tell just how much of this film may actually be the ramblings of an overactive imagination, where it could all be taking place inside Alex’s mind, such as this scene of Mireille, unsubtitled, set to The Dead Kennedys “Holiday in Cambodia,” where the former boyfriend returns for a brief, unintelligible conversation over the intercom, all observed by Alex,  where it’s clear this feels more like the mad and incoherent ramblings of two lost souls who are drifting apart in the night, a theme that pervades throughout the film Carax - Boys Meets Girls - 1984 - FRA (Interphone Scene ... - YouTube (4:36). 

The film is an expressionist reverie not far removed from Sartre’s first existential novel Nausea, a story concerning a man’s tenuous relationship with the surrounding city, offering glimpses into the anguish of the human soul through stream-of-conscious thoughts, as if reading pages from an intimate diary, where the writer is suffocating from a kind of existential dread where life is meaningless unless a person makes personal connections that give it meaning.  While one often feels immersed in a world of personal disgust and despair, these are fleeting and temporary moments in time, soon replaced by others just as ephemeral.  In much the same manner, Alex is barely connected to the elusively shifting world around him, estranged from friends and family, living alone in a tiny room, filled with his own enveloping interior sense of alienation and dread, constantly seen taking a drug, like popping liquid amyl nitrate, where he doesn’t so much inhabit the world as float through it in some strange and dream-like voyage through time, remaining disconnected from the world he lives in, as if unable to be a part of it.  People don’t converse so much as offer long and rambling monologues, reflective of a dreary and joyless existence where characters remain connected to some longstanding interior pain, unable to separate themselves from this anguish and personal trauma they carry around with them wherever they go.  Carax expresses this disconnection through jarring choices of music, or the use of long tracking shots, where the composition throughout is superb, often resorting to expressionist lighting, which has a dramatic effect, such as when one character is seen in sharp focus while another just inches away is slightly out of focus.      

Moody and overly detached throughout, there are brief moments that touch a different note entirely, such as Mireille pulling out a board in her apartment in order to practice tap dancing, an homage to the more playful moments of Anna Karina dancing in Godard’s BAND OF OUTSIDERS (1964) Bande à part (1964) - Dance scene [HD] YouTube (3:57), yet it’s connected to an extended sequence set to David Bowie’s “When I Live My Dream” where Alex wanders alone through the darkened night, where at one point he stops and stares, remaining infatuated by a couple kissing on the street, eventually tossing them a few coins as if this was a street performance "Boy Meets Girl" Bowie song (When I Live My Dream) - YouTube (3:43).  After a lengthy period where she exists only in his mind, Alex finally meets Mireille during an extended party sequence, knowing she’ll be there, so he crashes the party, yet is affectionately greeted with perfect bourgeois manners by the American party hostess (Carroll Brooks), before leaving him to fend for himself sitting between an elderly deaf-mute man (Albert Braun) and his gorgeous sign interpreter (Frédérique Charbonneau), insisting young people have forgotten how to talk Boy Meets Girl - Silent films were better, because... YouTube (3:18), before engaging Alex with tales of the old days of Silent cinema where he worked as a dolly grip, but Alex soon drifts off, following Mireille who’s in the bathroom, as it appears she’s about to commit suicide (we later realize she instead cuts her hair much shorter), leaving her alone as he slips into the kitchen where the hostess finds him alone, strangely confessing a piece of her heart, seen as a small part of an elongated party sequence Boys meets Girls - YouTube (9:52).  The party itself is a gloomy gathering honoring a dead soul, the brother of the hostess, the loss reflected in her quietly suppressed despair, which perfectly matches the depressed melancholia of the other characters.  Carax frames them beautifully here in an unsubtitled sequence Boy Meets Girl - Imbattable - YouTube (2:10) with Alex suddenly inspired, his soul aflame, interestingly expressed through the use of voiceover, where the film is a thinly disguised reflection of the director’s inner world, continually referencing dreamy thoughts of romantic longings that are ultimately frustrated by the reality of lost love and alienation.      

2012 Top Ten Films of the Year: #4 Holy Motors

HOLY MOTORS            A 

France  Germany  (115 mi)  2012  d:  Léos Carax

My guess is the more experience you have with cinema, the more you’ll like this film, which defies any narrative construction, yet continually exhilarates in its pure love and devotion to film language, much of it feeling like bits and pieces of old films all strewn together like broken parts to make something completely new.  Those with a need for rational explanation need not enter here, as to many this will simply not make sense, but certainly anyone who does give this a try can’t help but be blown away by the sheer originality and mad energy of the movie itself.  In other words you don’t even have to like it, but you can appreciate the unbridled joy with which this film was made, almost like a love letter to cinema itself.  Carax was once the boy wunderkind of cinema, where at 24 his first film Boy Meets Girl (1984), shot in black and white on location in Paris, won the Youth Award at Cannes, while his next Mauvais Sang (Bad Blood) (1986) was a post New Wave primary color extravaganza that won the Alfred Bauer Award at Berlin, an award given to a movie which opens new perspectives in film art.  Given a free reign over his next project, the boy wonder’s cost overruns created the most expensive French production in history, where production was halted several times before finally releasing the extravagant The Lovers of Pont-Neuf (Les Amants du Pont-Neuf) (1991), a sumptuous and romantic tribute to both Paris and lead actress Juliette Binoche, which was a colossal flop in Paris, not released internationally until 1999, thirteen years after his previous film.  When his next film POLA X (1999) was a huge flop as well, his career was all but finished, where we heard literally nothing about the man throughout the next decade, returning another thirteen years later to Cannes with this mammoth work that literally defies description, but is so ingeniously wacky that parts of the movie are simply off-the-charts hilarious, once again starring Denis Lavant as the director’s alter ego and stand-in for the creative force required to make an art film in the modern era.

This devoutly uninhibited film has such an edgy, stream-of conscious style that it likely summons different thoughts and ideas inside every head that shares this film experience, which plays out more like performance art, where Lavant is an outrageous chameleon-like character who literally takes on various disguises and different theatrical personas as he injects himself into the streets of Paris causing mayhem wherever he goes.  What’s intriguing straightaway is the viewer questions whether this character is even real or whether it’s some form of visiting spirit from a world beyond.  While this may not make sense to some, but it was reminiscent of The Phantom of the Opera, a scarred or disfigured character hidden from the world due to some deep personal tragedy or loss, living instead in a subterranean or alternate universe, which seems to be a blend of the future mixing with the past, where the connecting thread is the pure unadulterated joy of cinema.  Lavant is known by a half a dozen different names, but he’s driven around the streets of Paris in a white stretch limousine, where Édith Scob, the aged star of a French horror film more than 50 years ago, Georges Franju’s EYES WITHOUT A FACE (1960), is the driver, also dressed all in white, including the color of her hair.  She may as well be the driver of dead souls, as she transports Lavant around town where he sits in the back and receives 8 daily case assignments one at a time, literally transforming himself into character for each assignment, where the limo is largely a dressing room on wheels, where Lavant spends most of his time getting perfectly into disguise, becoming the manifestation of faded roles from cinema history which might die out altogether if he didn’t attempt to resuscitate them back into the modern world.  Much like the use of memories in Last Year at Marienbad (L'Année Dernière à Marienb... (1961), which may die if not remembered, Lavant seems to be the reincarnation of near dead movie roles, literally attempting to breathe new life into them, but taken completely out of context when set on modern streets, where he is literally out of place, out of time, where people on the street are aghast at what they see.  

The mix of fabulously designed set pieces and on-site locations are part of the brilliance of the film, as Carax does create an otherworldly impression throughout, where never for a single moment does anyone in the audience have any idea what’s happening next, where the built-up intrigue of these imaginary characters and what they’re doing returning back to earth is befuddling to say the least, where even the actors onscreen seem in complete bewilderment at Lavant.  In one assignment, like a creature from the silent era, Lavant turns into a little green Leprechaun with bright orange hair, a hideous creature that never utters a word but instead makes weird animal sounds.  When he crawls out of a sewer and leaps into a crowd on the street, people back away in disgust, where a high fashion photographer is taking photos of Eva Mendes as an haute-cuture fashion model, a statuesque figure of beauty, but this beastly creature instantly grabs the photographer’s attention, where he orders one of his underlings to immediately sign the creature up for a photo shoot.  When she attempts to communicate with the monster, she ridiculously attempts to relate by asking if he’s ever heard of Diane Arbus, famous for taking pictures of giants, dwarfs, and other freaks of nature.  Lavant simply grabs the model and carries her off into his lair in the sewers beneath the city that exists in stillness and in silence.  In such a short period of time, the marvel of invention that occurs in front of the camera in this one sequence is wildly imaginative and extremely cinematic, using rousing music in much the same way there are frequent cinema homages, as Carax is simply re-inventing cinema by reconnecting all the unused pieces, much like reassembling all the broken body parts of mannequins that we see strewn around the empty warehouse settings.

Midway through his day, Lavant’s assignment book reads “Entracte,” or intermission, conjuring up quick images on early archival black and white film stock of a shirtless man peforming before a crowd, like a circus act, which quickly cuts to Lavant leading a march of accordion players "Let my Baby Ride" by Doctor L (RL Burnside Cover)- Holy Motors OST  YouTube (3:20), an utterly enthralling piece of music that literally comes out of nowhere adding a sense of exhilaration to the film.  Who knows where Carax comes up with these ideas, where Lavant enters a Tati-like modern glass designed skyscraper dressed in a glow in the dark outfit where he does outrageous MATRIX-like dances in a darkened room, where he receives instructions from an unseen voice, like Warren Beatty in Mickey One (1965), becoming highly experimental using a dazzling strobe light effect, eventually joined by a shapely woman contortionist who can bend her body like a pretzel, with Lavant somewhere entwined.  Using two cinematographers, Yves Cape and Caroline Champetier, the streets of Paris often become hallucinogenic-tinged, or the shapes of buildings literally melt, creating phantasmagoric images of a reality unfolding into itself, where the world is seen in utter transformation.  Purely by chance, Lavant runs into an old flame, where he wanted to use Binoche, who apparently would not agree, so director Claire Denis suggested he use Kylie Minogue, where they have an extended sequence together that feels altogether unworldly on the rooftops of Paris, a direct reference to Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge (2001) that starred Minogue, literally bringing in film segments from every bit of the director’s own imagination.  This may be too much for some, who may wonder what in the hell is going on, but this is a quintessential dip into the collective subconscious history of cinema, where the entire movie is a subliminal flash in time, spliced together using bits of broken pieces, where the finale with Lavant finally at home, innocently looking out his window at night feels like he’s just a kid waiting for the arrival of Peter Pan.