Holy Motors (Leos Carax, 2012)

Leos Carax's Holy Motors, one of the standout releases of the year, reminds me another great recent picture, Jafar Panahi's This Is Not a Film. Panahi's (not a) film concerns a reaction to literal censorship, imposed by a theocratic dictatorship afraid of anything that might challenge their complete mental hold on the people. The barriers placed in front of Panahi's creativity are tangible: a prison sentence, an effective lifetime ban from filmmaking. Carax's work, on the other hand, comes after a 13-year dry spell between features, broken only by the occasional short. It is a reaction censorship figurative, not literal, with abstract obstacles of budget concerns and esoterica placed between the director and his drive.

Of course, the two are not equal, but then, Carax's response to the studio mothballing trades Panahi's open rage and sorrow for more muted, sarcastic cynicism. Of course, Carax also enjoys a place of privilege and thus channels his own frustrations into an elegy for all of cinema. Panahi declared his own work was not a film because of its format (and also, in fairness, a jab at authorities), but Holy Motors quivers with fears that, with the advent of digital and other new technology, no one will ever truly make a film again. This has the effect of inverting the usual dynamic of one of the director's films, in which escapist, pure cinema is grounded by a consideration of the consequences of breaking from society or form. Here, the invigorating reveries intrude upon the somber reflection, and if Panahi's un-film emerged as one of the great defenses of the artform's worth, so too does this latest in the calls for the Death of Cinema contradictorily energize the medium even as it pulls ever closer to its supposed death.

In essence, then, Holy Motors is one great magician's trick and con job rolled into one, and there can be no one alive better suited to pull off such a crowd-pleasing and -swindling act as Denis Lavant. Carax's primary on-screen avatar, Lavant enters the film through an enigmatic, fourth-wall breaking trip through a two-dimensional forest into a movie theater, but as odd as the sight is, the strangest aspect of it may be the actor's visible age. Unlike his director, Lavant has not disappeared for a decade, but when he stumbles his way to the theater, his slowed movements and slightly filled frame speak volumes for the time that has passed for the filmmaker who lives through him. Lavant's knotty face has always been lined with a false sense of age, but now his features are supplemented by actual wrinkles, and the actor looks sullen in his own, slightly sagging skin.

Perhaps that is why he spends so much of the film in other guises. By day, Lavant, as Monsieur Oscar, rides about town in a limousine driven by Céline (Édith Scob), receiving mysterious assignments that involve him donning various costumes, makeup and prosthetics in order to...well, that is not at all clear. When he dresses as an old, hunchbacked homeless woman and staggers to a corner to beg for change, what task could he possibly be fulfilling, and for whom? Likewise, one cannot help but be bewildered by Lavant reprising his Merde character from Carax's short in the anthology film Tokyo!, and that is before he abducts an ennui-frozen model (Eva Mendes) and secrets her to a sewer where he strips naked after converting her designer gown into a makeshift burqa. Is this a commentary on the objectifying nature of the fashion industry, which relies on women who fit a pre-set standards of beauty but then treats them as nothing more than mannequins? Is Merde, further robing the woman as he completely disrobes, also guilty of this? The most important question, though, is just what the hell is happening, anyway.

Almost immediately, Oscar's assignments come to resemble miniature performances and films in their own right. Occasionally, this connection is made even more explicit: an early vignette places Oscar in a motion-capture suit and has him perform moves in a vast, darkened room filled with infrared cameras to record his movements for later animation. Lavant's acrobatics come roaring back as he twirls and leaps, and the black room lightens with graphics as he runs on a treadmill, as if a hamster powering the whole room with his effort. Yet this scene also parades some of Carax's weariness, with Lavant occasionally stumbling and his incredible, dextrous movements (as well as his lascivious interplay with a mo-cap-suited woman who joins him) put toward a crude digital wireframe that lacks all the spark the actual people emit. Oscar voices this cynicism more openly when one of his bosses (Michel Piccoli) gets in the limo at one point to ask why his performances have lacked their usual vigor. "I miss the cameras," Oscar responds. "They used to be bigger than us. Then they became smaller than our heads. Now you can't see them at all." The last sentence suggests the nature of Oscar's work, and also that he may be as confounded at this point as the audience, as bewildered by his own actions with no visible watcher reassuring him that it is all an act. Oscar clearly wonders if there is a future in his line of work, and it is no coincidence that so many of his roles are elderly and infirm.

It is mournful stuff, yet Carax undermines his thesis at every turn by dint of his skill. The film's brief tours through characters and genres serves not as a visualization of cinema's life passing before its eyes but a constant series of rebirths that makes every sudden end to a sequence as revitalizing as alienating and insular. Carax's quasi-Luddite raging against new technology aside, even the gag of the rendered motion of Oscar and his female "co-star" speaks to cinema's ever-evolving means of showing an audience something new. Sure, the image of two strange beings wrapped in a programmed dance is less meaningful than the human movements that inform it, but Holy Motors lives for aesthetic pleasures for their own sake. Carax even cuts short the vignettes that threaten to become self-sufficient through their human impact, putting all stock into the joy of Lavant's Lon Chaney-esque donning of faces. And when Scob puts on a mask not unlike the one she wore in Eyes Without a Face, the film likewise celebrates even the occasionally glib satisfaction to be gained from postmodern reflexivity, placing among the various other ways films entertain us. A recurring image from the opening credits to the closing ones is a clip from a zoetrope, the once-novel trinket now a dated missing link in film's development. Presented without comment, the clip's meaning is clear: movies will never die, though they will not look as they did once upon a time. But neither, then, will people, as Lavant's face will attest. With this film, Carax proves that nothing can kill cinema, not even Carax.

We Own the Night (James Gray, 2007)

James Gray opens We Own the Night with a brief montage of gritty black-and-white still photographs of policemen in the late 1980s. These photos could be a time-capsule for a pre-Giuliani New York, still dangerous, still filthy. Still human, too: a photo of a cop jokingly playing with a finger puppet policeman with a gun breaks up the severe tone of the other stills and seems as foreign to the city as it exists now as the grime that got swept away to make way for hiked rents. But this montage also makes the introduction of Joaquin Phoenix's club owner, Bobby Green, that much more striking. Gray cuts suddenly to the actor in a florid red silk shirt, walking in slow-motion toward the moll (Eva Mendes) lazing on his gold-colored couch in a gold-colored frame. It is the flip-side of the stark photographs' depiction of New York sleaze, the color-drenched euphoria of those who rule as banal warlords over their turf, however small it is.

The juxtaposition of this sweltering, stylish melodrama with the earlier, ascetic realism likewise offers a clue into Gray's approach for the film: always intimately focused with fly-on-the-wall shots that capture the smallest expressions on an actor's face, but framed epically in the style of Michael Cimino or Francis Ford Coppola. Family, whether biologically programmed for manually collected, is as key to Gray's film as it is to The Deer Hunter The Godfather, films whose opening weddings lend to the start of We Own the Night its languid observation and outsized scope. This director moves faster than the other two, quickly laying out who links up to whom, but he displays the same patience for the minute revelations of character communicated by interaction and shot placement. Gray establishes Bobby as stiffly cordial with his father and brother, Burt (Robert Duvall) and Joe (Mark Wahlberg) Grusinsky, police officers both, but familial with the Russian mobster, Marat, who owns Bobby's club. Gray's next film would be Two Lovers, and this just as easily might have been called Two Families. The care Gray takes in setting up Bobby's complicated relationships with both parties makes the later narrative developments natural outgrowths of a fully realized situation rather than the simple genre mechanics they may initially seem.

Consider how Gray fleshes out Bobby's split loyalties. An early scene shows Bobby sitting down with Marat and Marat's wife for dinner. The old couple could not be more welcoming: Marat speaks to the young man as if he were a son, while the old woman fusses about trying to get him to eat one more bite as Bobby sheepishly laughs and declines politely. It has all the warmth missing from Bobby's subsequent meeting with his real father and brother, whose dark blue uniforms reflect their cool emotions on the color spectrum. When Bobby takes Amada to meet his family, Gray films the officers in an extreme long shot looking down from where the couple enter, the small but dense crowd of people leaving a blotch of ink in one corner where the officers stand rigidly. This shot also contrasts with a similar but hedonistically scaled shot back in the club, as many more patrons crush together with grasping hands reaching up at topless dancers in a sleazy recollection of the pyramid of men rising toward Brigitte Helm in Lang's Metropolis.

Yet Gray also suggests contradictory moods underneath these images. The stoic cops may suck the life out of Phoenix's Bacchanalian swagger, but they also attempt to make him part of the family by asking for his help in taking down Marat's nephew, Vadim. Bobby, naturally, refuses, unwilling to sell out the gangster both to save his own skin and out of genuine affection for his new family. Even that earlier, welcoming scene with Marat, however, betrays a truth Bobby might not want to face: nice as the old man is, he still controls Bobby, and all that the young man thinks is his is simply on loan. Much as Bobby delights in heading over to meet with his boss, he is still going to kiss the ring and pay his tribute.

So delicately is this character web spun that Gray takes a great risk funneling it into a genre story of cops and criminals that puts Bobby through the ringer to test his allegiances. When Joe carries out his raid of Bobby's club to arrest Vadim, he sets in motion a spate of reprisals that reveal the mercilessness of Bobby's second family and force him to choose which family to betray and which to support. And as he slowly returns to the side of the law as the prodigal son, Bobby finds himself caught up in stings, shootouts, protection programs and chases that seem worlds away from the stately, minutiae-obsessed opening.

Nevertheless, the inner conflict introduced in the first act inform even the most action-packed moments. Gray elides around typical suspense, playing with expectations of protracted narrative setups. Joe tells Bobby at the start that he is planning to raid his brother's club and arrest his associates, and Bobby scarcely has time to get back to his business before the cops come storming in. Likewise, the director does not string out the mob's push back against Joe, instead cutting almost immediately to the revenge. Yet this makes the attack as surprising for the viewer as it is for Joe, who does not even get the chance to fear for his life until the gun is pointed at his head.

Gray cares less for the tension than the payoff, which he films in moral terms. By not making an entire sequence of Joe being stalked, cornered and shot, he places everything in the split-second look of shock, terror and grim resignation that cross Wahlberg's face before the trigger is pulled. During a car chase between Vadim and a police-transported Bobby and Amada, Gray's kinetic editing spares three or four seconds to watch over Phoenix's soldier out the back window to see a civilian car swerving under a jackknifed semi. The shot allows us to see the crush of metal and the probable death but swivels back to face forward before the vehicle can even come to its full, sickening stop.

Most impressive is the sting that gets Bobby into this mess in the first place. The most traditionally suspenseful sequence of the film, the sting lets the threat of Bobby's exposure as a wired mole hang over his drug deal, but Gray manages to change up even this familiar trope when the deal, as it always must, goes bad. The only thing scarier than Bobby's discovery in this scene is the police's rescue, framed via a burst of machine gun fire flashing in a pitch-black doorway and indiscriminate in its killing. Bobby himself has to fling himself out of a window onto a chain-link fence to escape certain death, but not before one of the mobsters gets his head blown apart right over the man, splashing him with blood in a shot that captures every line of terror and revulsion on Phoenix's face. Violence, as Gray films it, has real consequences; much as the film concerns Bobby, We Own the Night also plays on Wahlberg's image as a brash tough guy to make the brother's PTSD and mounting disgust with guns and danger no less harrowing.

Above all, however, this is a film about identities, wherein names still have their ancient power and one who changes his surname effectively changes his relation. When Burt and Joe try to recruit Bobby into helping them at the start, Duvall speaks his son's altered surname, Green, with a mixture of fury and deep sadness. When the boy later confesses to his dad that he has disavowed Burt and Joe to the point that the mob does not even know of their blood ties, Duvall looks as broken and defeated as he did when his subordinates previously informed him of Joe's shooting. Gray even ties occupation to identity, and Bobby's slow immersion in police activity makes for a street-level version of the grandiose, symbolic analogies Cimino and Coppola drew out of their families. We Own the Night functions on a smaller scale, but its ambition (and formal skill) is no less great, and it is another reminder that James Gray is one of our finest contemporary directors.