Trois, douze, merde!

Holy Motors

Crit

Golly, I didn't realize that to get to a movie on my biennial post-Election Day holiday, I was going to have to brave snow and swirling winds. Good thing this didn't hit my region about 36 hours earlier--especially since my satellite has gone out, which didn't happen during Sandy (or Irene). But this brilliant film was well worth the effort.

I had read that it was surrealistic, and that's certainly the case, but that doesn't mean it lacks a plot. After a prologue in which a man apparently wakes from a dream only to find himself in another--unlocking a door to a movie theater with his socket-wrench middle finger--we meet M. Oscar, who, judging by his opulent home, his attire, and the stretch limo waiting for him, seems to be a financier.

"Many appointments today?" he asks his driver. Nine, she tells him. He has a phone conversation, the gist of which seems to be a need for more firepower in his security detail. So far, he could be an older version of the protagonist of Cosmopolis. Then he starts combing out the long gray wig.

His appointments, it develops, involves making himself up, costuming himself, and getting into character to appear in the world as a stooped old beggarwoman, a motion-capture actor for an erotic martial arts/sci-fi film, a sewer-dwelling floraphage in a cemetery where the headstones invite passersby to visit the deceased's website (yeah, it starts to get a tad weird at this point). A labeled entr'acte, in which Oscar leads a rock-and-roll accordion band, turns out to be yet another appointment, as is an assassination after which he begins to trade identities with the target, only to be assassinated in return, and in identical fashion.

So yeah, surreal; also thrilling, compelling, though also about 20 minutes too long. And it contains one of the best musical surprises imaginable for someone who rummaged West Virginia discount stores' cutout bins in the early '80s for alternatives to the crap he'd been listening to for the past decade or so--the best such surprise since Wreckless Eric's "Whole Wide World" in Stranger than Fiction.