Leos Carax is a French filmmaker who is known for Holy Motors. Carax’s film can be considered an “art cinema.” According to Bordwell, “art cinema” is a distinct type of film that is based on realism and authorial expressivity (which is defined as “recurrent violations of the classical norm”). Holy Motors is an art cinema due to its blend of realism and strangeness. The character of Mr. Oscar is realistic because he is psychologically complex, which is Bordwell’s definition of character realism. In the interview, Leos Carax commented on his movie and apologized for being vague in his response to a question from the interviewer. Carax explained that he created a science-fiction world where Mr. Oscar’s job is to show the “experience of living in the now.” He aimed to depict real life, which is already strange and complex, and, in his opinion, no “flashbacks or playing with the narrative” were needed. He preferred real-life ambiguity. Carax described the film as his “most unconscious” film, born as an image rather than a plot or a logical cause-and-effect reasoning. The events and motivations of the characters remained open-ended and not fully explained; they were intentionally left ambiguous (vague). The realism of the film does not rely on a well-defined plot, but rather on the movement of physical objects – human bodies, machines, and animals. Carax was also unconventional in his approach to shooting the movie: the film was made without reviewing daily footage, and Carax placed himself in front of the camera.
I recently watched the film Ready or Not (2019), a horror-comedy film. In the film, the characters are constantly using violence in a game-like way for unclear reasons. The main character, Grace, just got married to Alex and is suddenly asked by her new family to draw a card to play a game on her wedding night. Grace, then, is being hunted down (to be killed) by her in-laws after pulling the card to play hide and seek. As viewers, we are stuck throughout the film, wondering why all of this had to happen.
Later, we find out that this is a ritual that the family does every time someone marries into the family. The family believes that they have to kill Grace, or they will die because of a curse that runs in the family. Up until the end of the film, we do not know why the curse exists, and if it is even real or made up. This makes viewers question the sanity of the family as they do not seem to care enough if they shoot each other, and they are trying to kill Grace (a new member of the family who has done them no wrong) without remorse. Even at the end of the film, there is still not much clarity; it is very ambiguous as to why the family was cursed, how the curse works, and why Grace pulling the card to play hide and seek meant she had to die. There is no closure given to the viewers or to Grace.
Question to consider:
How does ambiguity change the way we interpret a film?
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