_Holy Motors_ and Yekaterina Golubeva

[septimus_...@q.com]

I wish I can summon the enthusiasm others have for Leos Carax's
_Holy Motors_, the only film I managed to see in New York. He
has always been an ingenius, innovative director, and it may be
churlish to ask him to exercise more discipline. Nevertheless,
_Holy Motors_ simply has too many ideas, no doubt because of Carax'
extended enforced hiatus from feature-film making. And it does not
have an organizing principle behind it, unlike _Pola X_ which is
loosely based on Melville(if memory serves). The main operating
principle seems to be that this is a movie and so anything goes
(playing with cinematic conventions). This is something Carax's
earlier fims do too, but they have such bubbling romanticism;
the overall elegiac tone and genre-subverting playfulness doesn't
somehow seem to mix. It is never boring to watch Dennis Lavant,
who has added tremendous depth to his craft. I must say that by
far the most genuinely moving moment of the film is the beginning
of the end credits, which pays tribute to the late Yekaterina
Golubeva (_I Can't Sleep_, _L'Intrus_, _Pola X_), probably Carax's
one-time companion. By the way, I never found out what she died
of -- seems very young at 45. I always suspect suicide, but
people do die of diseases and accidents at that age; a friend of
mine just did. In _Holy Motors_, the characters seem to be able
to regularly cheat death and treat the whole film as a joke. A
"science fiction" is supposed to be able to invent new rules but
should stick by them, and Carax simply doesn't.