People flipped for it at Cannes, they went apeshit for it at Fantastic Fest, heck, even the usually a-rod stiffs of the Upper West Side lovingly embraced its zaniness at the New York Film Fest. And now with
Holy Motors making a slow roll out over the next few months in the states (FYI, it just opened in NYC), today we get a fantastic snap-crackle-pop of a trailer. If there's one film I will be ashamed to miss in the theater this year, it'll be this one.
Over the course of a single day, Monsieur Oscar travels by limousine
around Paris to a series of nine "appointments," transforming into new
characters or incarnations at each stop. Fetched in the morning by
Celine, his trusty chauffeur on this surreal journey, Oscar begins the
day as a captain of industry. Then he becomes a gypsy crone, begging for
spare change on a bridge over the Seine. Inside a digital production
facility, he's a ninja warrior transformed by cutting edge technology
into a reptilian sex god. Next he's a gibberish-spewing troglodyte who
kidnaps a fashion model from a photo shoot in Pere-Lachaise cemetery,
ferrying her to his underground lair in the sewers. Then he's the
melancholy father of a teenage daughter, followed by a shadowy assassin
sent to kill his own doppelgaenger, a dying old man, and finally a
thwarted lover revisiting a flame from his past atop a decaying Right
Bank department store next to the Pont-Neuf. Monster movie, film noir,
romantic drama, musical, crime thriller, futuristic sex fantasia... HOLY
MOTORS is all of these and, then again, none of these. It is a
ravishing, shape-shifting, fever dream of becoming, unraveling and
starting all over again. From celluloid magic to the digital data
stream, Monsieur Oscar's epic journey of the soul is all of our dreams.