By the time we get to the graveyard where all the stones read "visit my website" (remember websites?) I began to suspect this hadn't aged well. My suspicions were confirmed when Denis Lavant's 'M. Merde' character, a violent sewer-dwelling goblin man, started fashioning a burqa for Eva Mendes – an image that, coming from a film made by a white French filmmaker in 2012, reads as incredibly queasy.
Ten years on, Leos Carax' eulogy for the death of cinema feels both premature and curmudgeonly.
This movie shows flashes of being good – Carax can be a joyful visual stylist, and Denis Lavant is constantly finding new insane ways to inhabit the characters he's presented with. There's a lot of pleasingly surreal material here. But behind every corner is a thudding metaphor or a scene that goes on for far too long.
Holy Motors sets up a fascinating world, but it's not really interested in inhabiting it – it constantly undercuts itself, opening doors to reveal only the auteur's preoccupations. And those preoccupations feel quaint from the standpoint of 2024.