This is a review of Holy Motors (2012)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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16 October
This is a review of Holy Motors (2012)
By which I mean (in the title)... ?
Well, if you've ever looked at the extras on the DVD of the original German version of Funny Games (1997), writer / director Michael Haneke doesn't expect you to go through the unremitting torture right to the end, which, itself, is just the beginning of the next cycle of it, which was set up during the film.
In fact, he suggests that it's a normal reaction to get to a point where you have seen enough. So, too, with Holy Motors (2012), and I have already indicated that, for me, that point would have been not long after the interlude, and thereby cut my losses.
After all, although there is a pretence that the contents of the day that we see are in real time, by the end of the third of M. Oscar's nine appointments, night has already unaccountably fallen, and nine appointments, despite a schedule to keep, do not get kept. But as if one cares, just as, with Haneke, as if one cares to keep willing evil to be defeated, whereas callous, pointless, calculated persecution is not going to be that easy - so why witness it all, just in the hope?
With Motors, arbitrary acts that are, at best, morally neutral have been stipulated for the day, but what is the point of following this diary through to an end? For it to mean something, when it is just a construct in Carax' mind, and, if he chooses not to explain it (or, at the end, to hint at banality), then it is hardly amazing that such withholding will occur or be foreseeable.
The DVD blurb for Haneke's film almost has a strapline of How fare will you go? I believe that Motors implicitly has the same one...
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