Holy Motors (2012)

Holy Motors arrives from 2012, a French surrealist fantasy from Leos Carax, and it presents the conscientious classifier with a difficult vintage. Denis Lavant plays Mr. Oscar, a man in a white limousine who spends a single day assuming nine identities: beggar, motion capture performer, sewer-dwelling goblin, dying patriarch, husband to a family of chimpanzees. No cameras are visible. No audience attends. The film declines to explain itself, which is either an artistic triumph or a refusal to do the reading. It competed for the Palme d'Or and did not win, which feels appropriate for something so unwilling to please.

On the matter of progressive sensibilities, the film is nearly barren. Race is never a subject. Neither is climate, nor body image, nor neurodivergence, nor any historical grievance requiring correction. The women, including Eva Mendes as a kidnapped model and Kylie Minogue as a dying air hostess, function as surrealist furniture. There is a small gesture toward economic resentment when Oscar, in a barbed-wire balaclava, guns down a wealthy banker, and the limousines themselves are photographed as dinosaurs of obsolete luxury. This is dream logic, not a manifesto. The film has no interest in telling us how to live.

The casting is largely white and French, with Ms. Mendes and Ms. Minogue supplying international texture, though nothing suggests a deliberate program of inclusion. Instead we get a film about performance, machinery, and the approaching irrelevance of the visible world. It is beautiful, baffling, and entirely unhelpful to anyone seeking moral instruction. I score it accordingly and move on to the next appointment.