A brief explanation of Holy Motors

After watching Leo Carax’s Holy Motors for the first time, I thought to myself, “this is it, the first movie I’ve watched that I can’t find any sort of meaning to”. It was truly an odd piece of work. But I later went on to have a brief discussion with my friends who had also seen the film. We came to the conclusion that it was about the downfalls of actors, and how the media targets.

The story follows Mr. Oscar, a man whose job is wear various costumes and carry out a number of strange “appointments”, where it seems that he is simply acting out a scene from a movie. The film follows Oscar as he goes from appointment to appointment, while each one gets progressively weirder. We analyzed each sequence and what they represent, and found that it shows a timeline of how the actors rise and fall. The first few sequences show how actors start off by following everything they’re told to do, no matter how strange they appear to society. The next couple of appointments represent the actors wanting to be their own individual selves, but media and society refuse to let them be unique. In the near final few sequences, it shows how they eventually just give up, and sacrifice themselves to forever live as society’s performing chimpanzees.

This was just a brief description of our interpretation, we did find a way of fitting all the random details into it.

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