Holy Motors is a surrealist film about nostalgia, or possibly a nostalgic film about surrealism. Actually, I'm not sure what it's really about. I'm not even sure if I'm supposed to know what it's really about. It's that type of movie.
The plot of Leo Carax's movie involves a day in the life of actor Monsieur Oscar (Denis Lavant). Céline (Edith Scob) drives him around Paris in a white limousine for various "appointments." Each appointment requires M. Oscar to apply makeup and become a different character in a scene. Most of the scenes appear to take place in the "real world" of Paris. They resemble performance art in which M. Oscar interacts with "real" people who are not actors, although the film raises the possibility that even the "real" people are actors on their own "appointments." Some of the scenes appear to involve actual violence and death, but the rules of reality are as fluid as the rules of identity in this film. Everything is ambiguous.
This voyage into the heart of surrealism has several intentionally funny moments, mostly based on the juxtaposition between the different levels of reality. However, this is also a melancholy film that is permeated by a sense of aging and loss. M. Oscar seems exhausted by the role playing that constitutes his life and the fleeting nature of his interactions with other people. His day is filled with memorable moments, but there's no foundation to give greater meaning to it. Perhaps this is a commentary on how we've become a society of surrealists that consumes media and even life itself in fragmentary moments that conceal an underlying emptiness.
I'm not certain if there is a grand unifying artistic vision behind Holy Motors. It's possible that Carax had a bunch of cool ideas for individual scenes and came up with a loose concept to justify putting them all in the same movie. In any case, there's a lot of imagination here and the scenes are generally quite impressive. Lavant deserves particular praise for his outstanding work in this film. He's the glue that holds this crazy mishmash of a movie together.