After watching the Holy Motor, Carax’s personal attitude of being a filmmaker and his ideology towards life and death attracted me so much that made me want to watch it one more time. The thesis of “life and death” seems to appear throughout the film, with 6 out of the 12 story pieces talking about “death”. The first piece narrates human perplexity and even death-longing through the eyes of an elderly, beggar woman. She wandered along the street, mumbling: “Every day I see only stones and footsteps. I worry that I will never die, but I still beg to survive because of what?” Because living is instinctual. It works even when you want to die.” The power of this text shocked me, and sympathetically I asked myself if I had such a confused moment, but in the end, I was brought back to reality by the instinctive desire to “live”. His presentation of the philosophy of life in a few words outcompetes the long and tedious narrative that finally gets this answer in some other classical films, which leaves more space for the audience to sympathize and think. The last paragraph includes a nondiegetic piece of music about people’s desire for rebirth. “Even if childhood is sad and life is full of misadventures, one still wants to do it again,” the lyrics of the music says. Death is always a heavy topic that people avoid talking about, but Carax tries to lead the audience to another question: Are we afraid of death, or is it only that we want to live a different life? When we talk about death, can we actually tell us how to live better？ Followed by was when the character went back home, all his family members are orangutan, the human ancestors, that also underlines the theme of rebirth. The power of experimental film is that though these elements seem to make no sense at all, we can suggest their underlying meanings when we closely read them and interpret by ourselves.

Another note-worthy part is the impressive character Monsieur Merde, who also appears in Carax’s other film Tokyo. His image of being rebellious, weird, and challenging the mainstream is just like Carax himself in the film industry who is not accepted by mainstream commercial films and capital. This also expresses his inner helplessness, seemingly to have become a madman in the eyes of everyone. It’s hard to say who’s weirder when the photographer snaps wildly at Monsieur Merde, mumbling “It’s so weird.”, even though the photographer is definitely considered mainstream and normal in the film. In this piece, Carax challenges people’s established values and forces us to ask “is the value we believe absolutely correct?”  Without explaining where Monsieur Merde is from, who he is and what’s his purpose of eating the rose, neither do we need to care about those, we were still able to interpret what Carax is trying to convey.