What’s it all about?

Holy Motors is so mad, deranged, lunatic, bonkers, cuckoo and away with the fairies that, if you were on a bus, and saw it boarding, you’d pray it didn’t sit next to you, although, knowing your luck, it probably would. That said, maybe you shouldn’t be quite so prissy and stand-offish. This film is a wacky ride, as well as a crazy, insane and off-the-wall one, but it is also peculiarly involving, exhilarating and unforgettable. I am still picking it out of my teeth, as if it were yesterday’s lamb chop, unlike the film I saw last week, whatever it was. (Was it good? Did I like it?)

This is written and directed by the French auteur Leos Carax, who hasn’t made a full-length film for over a decade, and is obviously a bit of a one. (He has, for example, contrived his professional name by combining Alex and Oscar, his first and second names.) His star is Denis Lavant, a wiry fellow with a pugnacious, weather-beaten face who shines not in the one performance, but in 11, or thereabouts. Let me explain, as far as I can, which isn’t very far, but at least I’m showing willing.

Levant is Monsieur Oscar, an inexplicable figure who is inexplicably driven around Paris in a stretch limousine by his driver, Céline (Edith Scob). Monsieur Oscar must, inexplicably, attend a variety of ‘appointments’ around the city and each appointment requires him to transform himself with make-up, wigs, costumes and prosthetics into someone else altogether: a decaying panhandler; a one-eyed beggar who eats graveyard flowers and abducts a supermodel (Eva Mendes); an assassin; a disappointed father; a dying old man; a sci-fi samurai and a family man who, at the end of the film, returns to a wife and child so surprising you will exclaim ‘WTF!’ if you are of a youthful disposition and ‘Heavens to Betsy!’ if not.

One incontrovertible fact: this is a film of visual magnificence and brilliance, with scenes that will get into your head and stay put, whether you like it or not.