Screenrush Guide to the 2012 Festival de Cannes

***FIRST REVIEWS***

The Hollywood Reporter: 'preposterous piece of filmmaking that appraises life and death and everything in between, reflected in a funhouse mirror.''****

Screen Daily: 'Overall, this is a film crammed with ideas, yet it lacks the grace of bona fide Surrealism; missing the aura of the genuinely, ineffably strange, it finally remains a self-conscious upmarket weird-out.'***

Time Out: 'it’s hard to say what forces are propelling this ecstatic, idiotic, fizzy, frightening provocation, but we’re moved by them too' ****

Variety: 'Audaciously giving itself license to do whatever it wants, Leos Carax's narratively unhinged, beautifully shot and frequently hilarious "Holy Motors" coheres -- arguably, anyway -- into a vivid jaunt through the auteur's cinematic obsessions' ****

The Guardian: 'it's funny, it's freaky: a butterfly that breaks the wheel of convention. It's just crazy enough to win.' *****

The Daily Telegraph: 'an exhilarating, lunatic odyssey that delves deep into the murky relationship between film and our dreams.' *****

With the exception of a small segment of Tokyo! In 2008, Leos Carax hasn’t made a film since 1999’s Pola X, a sometimes reviled, sometimes admired but rarely liked experimental romantic drama that is often associated with the New French Extremity. Holy Motors is only his fifth feature since 1984’s Boy Meets Girl and sees him staking out more experimental ground as he tells the tale – if we can call it that – of a ‘being’ referred to as DL (played by long time collaborator Denis Lavant) who darts from life to life, character to character, experiencing a momentary turn in a stranger’s life before being torn away from it and delivered somewhere else. He is aware that he is playing a part in a film but he is alone: there are no cameras, no crew, no director...

If that sounds too strange for you well that’s what you get when you translate a French synopsis into English and while perhaps it’s a film you yourself might never want to see there are some additional details that need to be taken into account. First of all Kylie Minogue is in it. According to the producers she’s playing ‘an actress’ but if some photos that emerged last year are to be trusted one of the characters she’s playing is wearing a dress borrowed from the original series of Star Trek. Secondly Eva Mendes is in it, no doubt as zanily dressed as Kylie. Thirdly French veteran Michel Piccoli... erm, hell, we’ve run out of reasons why this is going to be interesting, except to say that no matter how hard we try we just can’t forget Carax’s 1991 masterpiece Les Amants du Pont-Neuf and there’s always the hope he’ll live up to the reputation he earned for himself with that long distant but still majesterial effort.