The sinister temperament, the eerie situation, the dream-like narrative, the allegory of light and shade, the exaggerated visual symbols... In a sense, the "low-production director" Leo Carax's new film "Holly Motors" is not for everyone to see, because in the process of watching the film, it is likely to breed a little impatience and multiple confusion, but this film is indeed worth watching the public.
Admittedly, this film is a little obscure, a little weird, and if you look at it from the perspective of a peeping leopard, you may miss it all. At the beginning of the film, it shows its dream and reality, reality and illusion intertwined and parallel side, as if the play in the play, the shadow in the shadow, and as if the dramatic superposition, the director personally enters the play with the posture of a awakened sleeper, and then unfolds a world hypnotized by light and shadow.
As if the screen reproduction of "fantasy realism", the film spans reality and dreams, and the director once again openly exaggerates the earth in front of his God in the annotation of human behavior patterns, mentioning the helplessness and blindness of being born as a human being, tearing away the brilliance and sinister of the film industry. The film seems to pay no attention to narrative logic, as if the non-linear reproduction of fragmentary life, but the ten nightmare-like stories in the film are all strung together by a clue and a character, which are connected to each other but unrelated. While weakening the logic, the film is very colorful in terms of the repressive release of emotions and even the wildness, and the emotion is entangled with the people and things that exist in reality, which in turn reflects a kind of whimsy, so that the audience who looks into it will unconsciously be hypnotized in the obscure context, just like the pattern produced by some film creations.
The film involves many thoughts, such as reflection on the film manufacturing industry, the engulfment and alienation of the profession on the practitioners, and the worries brought about by new technologies. For fans, the ironic color of the English title holly motors and the male protagonist's name Oscar is obvious, and at the same time, it is not difficult to understand the day of the actor in the film, the real and false performance life, but the role of the black and white images flashed back in those places will trigger different feelings of different people. Those black and white pictures seem to come unexpectedly with old marks, as if they are revealing Oscar's life course with ancient fables, as if to say that the "hard labor" of his life is boundless, and the never-ending hard labor is undoubtedly the most vivid symbol of the absurdity of human existence. It seems that many explanations are feasible, but each one seems to be hidden from the other.
The protagonist of the film seems to have a sense of existence, he seems to be everywhere, not impossible, but he seems to have no sense of existence, and he is not him in every story, Filoda Dostasky said: "The mystery of human existence is not only to live, but to find the goal of living." Oscar's daily goal in life is to complete a series of performance tasks, and the cycle begins, from opening his eyes to closing his eyes, not only for a day, but also for ten different types of performances. As he interprets the lives of others in these parallel lives, he uses a luxury car to get from one station to the other. The "car" here is like a prop, a carrier, as if it is one of the embodiments of the industrialization of the film, in the car, he disguises, he talks, he is irritable, he is angry, he rests, he breathes, but all these emotions are like the transition from here to the other. And the plot about the character's experience in the extended luxury car is easily reminiscent of Cronenberg's new film "Metropolis".
Each of Oscar's ten missions has a bizarre and eccentric factor, and each of the ways of expression is both very different and unified, and the difference is that some of the images in different genres have the shadow of other films, and the unity is that the application in the film has the flavor of Carax, in which the part that plays the strange Man Maude seems to be the director recalling a creation of his own. When the mission ends at "homecoming", it is the orangutan wife and children who give Oscar the warmth of the world, and this strange "family of three" gives this bizarre professional experience an alternative station.
There is a line in "Lovers of The New Bridge": "The person who appears in the dream, wake up and go to see him." Even if dreams are vain and absurd, Carax implicitly or implicitly whispers and tries to break taboos, conventions, and limitations. Throughout his small number of films, but all with amazing elements, there are some taboo colors. It seems that one of his tasks in lighting and shadowing his thoughts is to constantly raise sharp and alienating questions, and to create a non-mainstream trend and pattern, even if his artistic creation is not to oppose the universal view, but as an artist, he may be inherently obedient and contradictory, his films are not dialogue, not interaction, but ahead of the alarm, he seems to be in some strange evolution and transmutation, making a transcendent response to the endangered things that he is alert to.
At the end of the film, the cars mentioned "de-mechanization" in the "sleeping meeting", which means that the film technology has turned again, and each application of new technology has had a revolutionary impact on the film, and there are always a large number of practitioners who have disappeared. In addition, Denis Rawang's performance is excellent, and he hopes that the massive intrusion of new technology will not bury the acting skills of powerful people like him.