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Edith Scob in “Holy Motors,” directed by Leos Carax. The film makes references to Georges Franju (“Eyes Without a Face”), King Vidor and Mr. Carax’s earlier work.
THERE is a scene in “Holy Motors,” the new film by Leos Carax, in which two long-lost characters are reunited. One of them tells the other, “We have 20 minutes to catch up on 20 years.”
This is a filmmaker who knows from lost time. “I’ve done 10, maybe 12, hours of film in 30 years,” Mr. Carax said one recent afternoon, in an interview at a tea shop in his Belleville neighborhood here. He did not sugarcoat his conclusion: “I’m not a cineaste. I’ve made so few films. Sometimes it feels each one is the last one or the first one.”
Mr. Carax’s remark sums up his curious supernova trajectory: three features in his 20s, and only two since. (He is now 51.) But it also describes the delirious energy and daredevil bravado of his movies, which could be said to capture the intensity of first sensations or the urgency of last gasps. He burst onto a moribund post-New Wave scene in the ’80s, inspiring comparisons to Rimbaud with the flamboyant expressions of amour fou “Boy Meets Girl” (1984) and “Mauvais Sang” (1986). The wildly romantic, hugely overbudget “Lovers on the Bridge” (1991) stalled his career for nearly a decade. “Pola X” (1999), an ambitious, eccentric Herman Melville adaptation, failed to revive it. There was an even longer gap before “Holy Motors,” which had its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May and opens in New York on Wednesday.
Mr. Carax has often kept the press at arm’s length. (He did not grant interviews at Cannes this year.) But seated at a sidewalk table here, sipping mint tea and chain-smoking Camels, his dog curled up at his feet, this maker of unapologetically personal films spoke about his life and work — and their interrelation — with matter-of-fact candor. “I’m not only my films,” he said at one point, “but I’m pretty much my films.”
“Holy Motors” follows a professional shape-shifter, Monsieur Oscar (Denis Lavant), as he is chauffeured around Paris in a stretch limousine on a series of mysterious appointments. Each one calls for him to play a preassigned role: a hunched bag lady, a rabid leprechaun, an assassin (and his doppelgänger victim), an old man on his deathbed. In a movie that suggests by turns commedia dell’arte, performance art and a video game, every costume change occasions a dalliance with a new genre: film noir, monster movie, domestic drama, musical.
“Holy Motors” plays at times like a love letter (or an elegy) to the cinema, with nods to Georges Franju and King Vidor and echoes of Mr. Carax’s earlier work. But for Mr. Carax spotting references is beside the point. “The film speaks the language of cinema, but it’s not a film about cinema,” he said. “I created a world — not our world exactly but not that far, either — and I tried to show the experience of being alive in this world.”
In an interview at Cannes Mr. Lavant, who has starred in four of Mr. Carax’s five features, described “Holy Motors” as the apotheosis of their long collaboration. “It’s the work of a mature man,” he said. “Leos’s way of looking at things in this film makes me think of Pier Paolo Pasolini, another great filmmaker who once said that he was like a bird in flight, which sees everything but doesn’t forgive everything.”
The singer Kylie Minogue, who has a small but crucial role, said she sees it as a film about the slipperiness of identity. “It brings up questions about the potential of a human being and what particular cosmic frisson makes us the person we are,” she said.
Mr. Carax recalled that the starting points were powerful but vague. He was fascinated by the wedding limousines creeping through his neighborhood on weekends: “They say, ‘Look at me but don’t see me.’ ” He was also struck by the stooped beggars camped out near the Seine, in plain view of passers-by yet routinely ignored. “I thought about how you approach someone from another world,” he said. “That’s when I had the idea of a character who would go from life to life, experience all the states of life.”
What began as an exercise in imaginative empathy evolved into an open-ended riff on metaphysical themes: the lines between acting and being, the loss of experience in a virtual age. “The virtual world is something they’re trying to sell us,” Mr. Carax said. “It’s not the same as the invisible world, which is what lives inside us.”
He came to “Holy Motors” after a long period of trying to work outside France. He tried to make “Scars,” a retelling of the Faust legend set in Russia and the United States; wrote an adaptation of Henry James’s “Beast in the Jungle”; and toyed with the idea of a documentary about the female voice (“I would travel all over the world and record lullabies”). But nothing came to pass.
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