I am a pretty open-minded individual and will watch most films even if I don't particularly like them. It is extremely rare that I actually abandon watching a film before the end. This was one of them. I only managed 40 minutes of this.
There is no plot, there is no way to judge the acting as the settings are so weird that it is impossible to imagine what a believable character or person should or could be feeling during any of the scenes.
if you want to put yourself through this, fine, but you have been warned!
What starts out as a kind of live-action role play, as a wealthy man dresses up as a hunchbacked homeless woman, quickly moves into much stranger territory. The second scene has him performing in a motion-capture suit, eventually performing a weird highly sexual dance with a woman that becomes transformed into alien pornography. In the third, he's a bestial imp, a savage leprechaun who violently kidnaps a beautiful fashion model, who sings him to sleep in an underground cavern.
It could be seen as a version of Shakespeare's "all the world's a stage", but as the ironically named Mr Oscar proceeds through his nine appointments for the day, we are left to wonder what is really going on. Oscar seems compelled to fulfil his roles by some tremendous obligation. There seems to be some kind of audience watching. One of the most quietly effective scenes involves him playing a frustrated parent driving his adolescent daughter home from a party. In another, he apparently murders another version of himself.
The central performance by Denis Lavant is wonderful and gives this movie its heart.
A surrealist French movie Holy Motors is more like a music video montage than a traditional narrative film. It begins with a well dressed man leaving his home, being bid goodbye by a small child, to climb into a white stretch limo and sitting before a dressing table and illuminated mirror and a black folder containing his list of “appointments”.
For the next hour or so we watch this man emerge and return to his limo in various costumes and disguises and involve himself in all manner of bizarre situations; encounters, ranging from the abduction of a photographic model and a strangely mournful ballad from Kylie Minogue in an abandoned department store.
Director Leos Carax calls the film an exploration of death, and one can see what he was attempting to get at, the encounters with the beautiful and bizarre women of Paris are filled with metaphors and reference to death, reincarnation and ghosts.
Ultimately Holy Motors is a failure as a narrative exploration of death and the meaning of life but as an artistic expose of the social preconceptions of life and death it is certainly fascinating and thought provoking.