Chapter 4 - Achieving Coherence: Diegesis and Death in Holy Motors

Summary

Leos Carax's 2012 film Holy Motors follows a certain M. Oscar (Denis Lavant) as he pursues a series of ‘rendezvous’ that involve performing as a great many characters; he is driven from one appointment to the next in an enormous white limousine by his chauffeuse, Céline (Édith Scob). The film is many things – depending on who one listens to it might be a love letter to the cinema, an elegy or even an obituary for film, an exultation in the multi-faceted possibilities of screen performance, or a self-indulgent and only intermittently successful mess of uncoordinated fragments – but neither its admirers (of whom I am one) nor its detractors have paid much serious attention to its diegesis. The strategy of simply assuming that any investigation into the possibility of a coherent diegesis will prove fruitless is encountered from two sides, as it were: for many of the naysayers, Holy Motors doesn’t even attempt to play by the rules, while for some in the yes camp it travels far beyond the trivial straitjackets of narrative logic, leaving them reeling irrelevantly in its dust. In this chapter I will explore this neglected aspect of the film – diegesis – by attempting a reading that largely follows the sequence of events as they unfold. This will provide an opportunity to explore the relationship between orientation and coherence from a different angle than in the previous chapter. There, my focus was on the question of the global coherence of INLAND EMPIRE and its relationship to our orientational strategies. Here, I want to look more closely at the impact that these issues have for our relationship with the film as we progress through it, whether on a first or a subsequent viewing.

I want to use the question of the senses in which Holy Motors might or might not be said to have a coherent diegesis to explore the proposition that it is less useful to describe a film as being coherent (or as having coherence) than to see coherence as something that is (or is not) achieved by the film in question. Perhaps it is more helpful to say that certain films achieve the status of a unified whole (coherence being what unified wholes exhibit) than that they possess such a status.