Holy Motors (Leos Carax, 2012)

Carax's return after 13 years of hiatus brought out a wave of critics genuflecting before a prodigal auteur, but why? Granted, his go-to-guy Denis Lavant has bags of range, from acrobat to emotive drama to out-and-out loon, and this is very much a vehicle to let him show absolutely all of that as we follow him through nine different acting jobs in a day across Paris in the course of a day, covering everything from dying old man through motion capture artist for a pervy CGI fantasy film and gibbering troglodyte from the sewers to professional assassin and former lover of Kylie Minogue. Then, in the end, a father to chimpanzees.
This is all for an audience that we're repeatedly told doesn't actually exist, because there are no cameras, and it's clearly meant to say something about the nature of performance arts and their purpose. But the point remains irritatingly, wilfully unfocused. It seems to be enough for Carax to chuck enough dissonant weirdness at the screen in the hope that the viewer will make some of it coagulate into a personal meaning. It's a tremendously lazy and self-indulgent presumption and Carax is hardly the only artist to have tried this, but not too many in the cinematic field have the sheer audacity to chance it. If that still sounds like a lure or virtue, it shouldn't.

5/10