Leos Carax’s Holy Motors premiered at Cannes in May and Fantastic Fest in September, where it’s racked up rave reviews (above 90 on RottenTomatoes) and was picked up for distribution by Indomina. It’s out now in New York, expands nationally in November, and just released an English-language trailer, which you can watch below.
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 Céline, 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, heʼs a ninja warrior transformed by cutting edge technology into a reptilian sex god. Next heʼs a gibberish-spewing troglodyte who kidnaps a fashion model from a photo shoot in Père-Lachaise cemetery, ferrying her to his underground lair in the sewers. Then heʼs the melancholy father of a teenage daughter, followed by a shadowy assassin sent to kill his own doppelgänger, 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.
Basically, the kind of film critics love to love. Check out this trailer! It’s got:
- French!
- Laurel graphics!
- Review Quotes!
- Make up!
- People singing for some reason!
- Masks!
- Kylie Minogue!
- A Big Dog!
I’m sold. You had me at “a big dog.” By the way, this is the most “acclaimed indie film” screencap of all time:
Perfect.
—
Sprockets!