Holy Motors makes one feel like they have accidentally consumed illegal substances on the way into the theatre because not only does it seemingly avoid any kind of story (at least in classical form), it is also completely absurd; complete with gorilla families, talking cars and computer generated alien sex. It was suggested in class that the film is intentionally lacking narrative, though if that was the intention of the filmmakers, they were unsuccessful, I tend to think of the film as having many seemingly disconnected narratives. At no point in the film, does the audience lose interest. Film Art: An Introduction suggests that all art contains form and this is the reason we are annoyed when someone changes the channel in the middle of a television show or we lose a book half way through. Our mind’s are not designed to appreciate the film simply for the experience, we crave the ending, the resolution, beginning, middle and end, three act structure.

Holy Motors, though seemingly lacking resolution does still follow film form. When it comes to Repetition and Variation, the film skilfully upsets your expectations. By constantly leading you back to the limousine between these seemingly ridiculous, eclectically arranged scenes, the film’s repetition, creates the expectation that the narrative should tie up the loose end, or at least explain the significance of the limo, or the characters that we see throughout the film, things that have been repeated. Film Art refers to these as formal expectations and explains the construction in terms of poetic form (AB, ABA etc.). Holy Motors seems to abuse conventional form by setting up so many expectations and subtly coercing the audience toward believing a resolution is imminent and then tears those expectations apart. For me, certainly, I spent the entire film wanting it to all make sense, almost the “Inception” conclusion, when suddenly you understand that the reason Cobb’s wife killed herself was because he put the idea there in the first place. That sudden feeling of all the puzzle pieces fitting together, instead it was the realisation that the pieces were from 3 different boxes and half of them were missing and there was no way the pieces were ever going to come together.