“All the world’s a stage,/ And all the men and women merely players;/ They have their exits and their entrances;/ And one man in his time plays many parts” (Shakespeare, As You Like It).
I think the world is a stage in Holy Motors. The limo is like backstage, with the Hollywood vanity mirror, costumes, and makeup. We even hear Oscar practicing a line that he later says in the hilarious death scene with “Léa” (Élise). Maybe hilarious isn’t the right word, but I enjoyed a hearty snigger at the obvious theatricality and melodrama of the interaction. Once I got into it, I liked this movie a lot. I could start to predict things— of course Oscar was going to get up and go on after being shot multiple times in the torso! After all, he had just come back from being stabbed in the neck. I saw echoes— while the connecting door in the hotel wasn’t technically a hidden door, it had a similar feel. Add a man, in bed, with a dog? It reminded me of the opening sequence. I felt like I was playing a video game where I was finally starting to make sense of the world, the rules, and the themes. For me, watching this film was a weird and wonderful experience.
A scene that stood out to me was when Oscar and the concerned guy from the agency talked in the limo. According to my notes, they discussed how small and imperceptible cameras have become, Oscar’s believability to his watchers, and the idea that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I started to watch this movie as if every time Oscar stepped out of the limo, out of the liminal, interior space where he could be honest and authentic, he was participating in a piece of performance art— perhaps even acting for a camera we can’t see. We as watchers had a choice to believe or not to believe what we were seeing. And while I think I constructed a somewhat plausible explanation for what was literally happening in the movie— a professional actor going from gig to gig to film short scenes— that was just a way to force the film into a narrative I could wrap my head around. But the “literally,” the what’s-really-happening, my made-up, interpretive narrative isn’t what matters. I think the limo driver putting on a mask before stepping out asks us to recognize that all humans grapple with the actor’s struggle: we all struggle to define ourselves, to disentangle and distinguish ourselves from the many roles we play.
