HOLY MOTORS screening at FOMO Cinema Tbilisi

Leos Carax | 2012 | France/Germany | 1h56m | Presented in the original French audio with English subtitles

HOLY MOTORS is one of the defining films about acting, performance and the unstable life of cinema in the 21st century. Leos Carax follows Monsieur Oscar, played by Denis Lavant, as he is driven across Paris from one appointment to the next, each stop requiring him to disappear into a new role, a beggar, a father, a killer, a motion-capture body, a dying man, a grotesque creature from the sewers. That structure gives the film its movement, but the real subject is transformation itself. Carax turns the actor’s body into a whole history of cinema, from silent-era physicality to digital image-making, from melodrama to slapstick to something close to nightmare.

Carax had not made a feature in over a decade, and HOLY MOTORS arrived like the work of a director returning with every instinct still intact and nothing to prove to anyone. Denis Lavant, Carax’s great collaborator since BOY MEETS GIRL, MAUVAIS SANG and LES AMANTS DU PONT-NEUF, gives a performance that feels bottomless in its range and physical commitment. Edith Scob’s presence adds another layer for anyone who knows Georges Franju’s EYES WITHOUT A FACE, and the great accordion sequence in the church has already entered modern film lore as one of those moments that is too strange, too alive and too purely cinematic to belong anywhere else but on a big screen.

What matters about HOLY MOTORS is that it does not treat cinema as a stable language. It treats it as something volatile, haunted and always mutating. The film is funny, melancholy, vulgar, beautiful and intermittently deranged, sometimes all within the same scene. It is full of masks, limousines, dressing rooms, digital surfaces and exhausted bodies, and it keeps asking what remains of cinema once identity itself has become performance. Very few films from the last fifteen years feel this free, and very few directors have made a return this audacious.

Please come see HOLY MOTORS this Saturday prepared to have your mind expanded!

LOCATION: FOMO Secret Cinema, Bazari Orbeliani, Tbilisi. A five minute walk from Liberty Square metro.

HOW TO FIND FOMO: Enter Bazari Orbeliani via Atoneli St above Carrefour and take the stairs on your left to the first floor. You can also check our Instagram story highlights for a video showing exactly how to find us:
https://www.instagram.com/stories/highlights/17933106294029235/