HOLY MOTORS (Three and a Half Stars)

France: Leos Carax, 2012 (Indomina)

Holy Motors is a film of shadows and false faces, of traveling players. of humans and machines, of mirrors  and makeup.  Behind this bizarre picture  — a  quitessentially French, perverse and quite entertaining new film by longtime “bad boy” Leos Carax — lies a near century of movie surrealism: decades of deliberately fantastic, illogical and sometimes pathological/psychological film poems in which the cineaste (Luis Bunuel or Jean Cocteau or Maya Deren or Carax or others) tries to dream on screen and to carry us into his/her maddest reveries.

Here the reveries are mad indeed. A man and a dog wake up in a strange room with a strange door that opens into a strange theatre showing a strange silent film. (Something by a Cocteau or a Bunuel?) The day is just beginning. For the rest of the film we will follow the (apparently) workday rounds of this man, a traveling player named M. Oscar (played by the defiantly sullen and unsmiling anti-star and Carax regular Denis Lavant), who is driven around in a limousine by a lady chauffeur named Celine — played by Edith Scob. who long ago, played the girl without a face in Georges Franju‘s 1960 horror-fantasy classic Eyes Without a Face. As Celine takes him around Paris in this journey to the end of the night (at the behest of a mysterious agency represented at one point by Bunuel cohort Michel Piccoli), M. Oscar appears at various places and plays various roles for a strange variety of people.

As far as I could glean or remember, M. Oscar impersonates, with Celine’s help — and thanks to a well-stocked supply of makeup and costumes in the back of the limo — a financier, an old beggar-woman, a motion capture lover/dancer in a black unitard, a wild sewer-dwelling hooligan named M. Merde, a dying uncle, a charismatic musician, a hired killer and his victim/double, and the lover of a heart-breaking chanteuse played and sung (to the hilt) by Kylie Minogue.

SPOILER ALERT

At the end of the day, night has fallen, the actor returns home (to an exceedingly weird household), and the cars gather together in their garage for a strange communion.

END OF SPOILER

The limousine-set Holy Motors, beautifully shot around Paris by cinematographers Caroline Champetier and Yves Cape, would make an interesting double feature with David Cronenberg’s New York-set limo movie, Cosmopolis; it’s just as compelling, less preachy and more poetic. Lavant, who has to virtually carry the movie, gives a fantastic performance, and he’s memorably supported by Scob, Minogue, Piccoli. Eva Mendes (as a model kidnapped by M. Merde) and the others. Philistines will no doubt be incensed at Carax’z perverse ending and the rest of his film’s sheer oddball whimsy and incitements. Art-lovers (and lovers of French cinema, from Melies and Feuillade to today) may be entranced. I liked it myself.

So God bless surrealism, buried meanings  and movies that wander off beaten tracks. God damn the thought police. But listen, maybe I’m just getting  older, and painfully nostalgic for the good old, bad young days of movie surrealism and cinematic mad dreams in black and white. And of dogs running free, Andalusian or otherwise. (In French, with English subtitles.)

CHASING MAVERICKS (Two and a Half Stars)

U.S.: Curtis Hanson/Michael Apted, 2012 (20th Century Fox)

The main problem with Chasing Mavericks — a generally well-done bio-movie about California surfer Jay Moriarity, who became a legend at 16 — is that the waves have more charisma than the leading man.

Jonny Weston, who plays Moriarity. has curly-frizzy blonde locks and a ripped torso and he even does most of his own surfing. But he also has amiable but vacuous pretty boy looks that suggest blonde actors like Troy Donahue or Christopher Atkins  — that summon up less a great, driven surfer on a date with destiny, than a male model with a date at the Santa Monica pier. I’ve seen Weston at least one other time recently, in the lousy behind-the scenes porno industry movie About Cherry,  but I can barely remember what he did in it.

I can and will remember him in Chasing Mavericks. But that’s mostly because of his role, and because he’s playing, at least part of the time,  with those incredible waves — the awesome rolling towers of water and spray and curling doom that better men (and women) than I am, conquer or fall before: especially the 50-foot-high titans called The Mavericks (off Half Moon Bay), that the real-life Jay Moriarity managed to ride, or get wiped out by (as in the cover photo for Surfer Magazine that made him famous),

The movie is about how legend Jay fell in love with the ocean, and how the ocean swept him away.  It’s a bravura story. We first see Jay at 9 (played by Cooper Timberline). He tries to navigate some heavy waves and nearly gets smashed on the rocks, and he meets his eventual mentor/teacher Frosty Hesson (played with lots of surly, intent looks and multi-colored surfboards by Gerard Butler, who also helped produce). Frosty saves Jay from that first smash-up. He also knows the location of the seemingly mythical Mavericks, and Jay follows him (on the roof of Frosty’s van), to discover them for himself and get to ride them someday. Frosty, recognizing a surfer obsessed, decides to save him again, by teaching him the way of the surf: physical, dietetic, athletic and spiritual.

This thorough, almost priestly,  preparation, is also observed by the rest of a generally good ensemble: Jay’s troubled, often frazzled, mom Kristy (Elisabeth Shue, looking great in a  frayed role), Frosty’s sprightly, self-sacrificing wife Brenda (Abigail Spencer), assorted beach bullies and fellow surfers, and the blonde Kim (Leven Rambin), Jay’s soul and inspiration, He rises; the waves fall. It’s a true story, and a lot of it probably happened, but still, when you look at Weston here, you almost keep expecting Paul Lynde to come running up the beach, with a movie contract. Could the real Moriarity have seemed so amiable and low voltage? But that’s the way our movies, all too often, go.

Chasing Mavericks had two very good directors working on it: Curtis Hanson (who made the modern neo-noir classic L. A. Confidential) and Michael Apted — who does the wonderful British “Up” documentary series, and who finished up the film when Hanson had health problems. They both do a pretty good job here, though Hanson obviously wanted something more, and though there was probably an inevitable fracturing of the show’s style.

Jay Moriarity is a great movie subject, and  Chasing Mavericks actually has a story with the potential to match Milius — or almost match him. But the waves take over. They curl, they crash. They tower up toward the sun and clouds. There’s just  no upstaging them.

Be Sociable, Share!

• 
•