The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Leos Carax · a film in French, with some English · 2012 · about 115 minutes · shot on digital video
Mode
Episodic film of roles on one frame; thriller, monster film, family drama, musical, deathbed melodrama and gangster film inside one working day
Mythos
The man of many shapes passing through bodies from waking to a last home; the hearse and the ferrywoman crossing a city of the dead; the wild man who carries off beauty; the self murdered by its double
Phase
One day, dawn to night, a dossier of appointments kept from a white stretch limousine, framed by a sleeper who wakes into a cinema and a garage where the cars are put away
Presentation
Feature film, about 115 minutes, shot on digital video, in French with some English; no conventional score, the music placed in the scenes
Register
From the grotesque to the lyric: a monster in a cemetery, an accordion march through a church, a song in a gutted store, a deathbed in a hotel room
Scale
One actor’s working day, and the history of the medium behind it
Governing Proposition
Through one day in Paris a man called Oscar is driven in a white limousine from appointment to appointment, and at each he becomes someone else, a banker, a beggar, a monster, a father, a killer, a dying man, for no camera anyone can see. The wager of the film is that a life of roles played on schedule, for an employer never seen and an audience that may not exist, is still a life and costs the body that plays it, and that cinema, its cameras shrunk out of sight, has become the condition of everyone who performs under observation.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins with a sleeper. Leos Carax himself wakes in a dark room, finds a key grown into his finger and opens a door in the wall, and the door gives onto a cinema full of sleeping spectators. Before this come the chronophotographs of Étienne-Jules Marey, a body moving in a sequence of still images: the medium’s first studies of motion. A film about performance with no visible camera opens on the camera’s beginnings and on an audience asleep.
Then the day. A man, played by Denis Lavant, leaves a house in the morning as a banker, with bodyguards, and gets into a white stretch limousine. His driver is Céline, played by Édith Scob, and on the seat is a dossier of appointments. He is Monsieur Oscar, and from dawn to night he will be carried across Paris from one appointment to the next. Between them, in the back of the car, he makes himself up, changes, and unmakes himself again. No one tells him who has set the appointments, and no one films them that the audience can see.
Carax wrote and directed the film. Caroline Champetier photographed it, Nelly Quettier cut it, and it was produced by Pierre Grise Productions, Martine Marignac and Maurice Tinchant, as a French and German coproduction. It was shot on digital video, the first of Carax’s features made so, and was his first feature since Pola X (1999). It runs about 115 minutes, in French with some English. It was shown in competition at Cannes in May 2012 and released in France that July. There is no conventional score: the music is placed in the scenes.
Movement II
Each appointment is a role, played in full for whoever is there to receive it. Oscar becomes an old beggar woman, bent over on a bridge, holding out a hand to people who pass. It is a sketch, quickly done, and the car is waiting. The day is a working day, and the roles are its labour: each is put on in the limousine, carried out in the street, and taken off again on the way to the next.
In a studio he puts on a black suit studded with points of light, and a second body in the same suit joins him; the two dance, and on a monitor their movements become serpents coupling, a dragon on a screen. All the work is his body’s, and none of the image is. The actor’s labour is recorded with the actor removed from it, and what remains of him is the light on his joints.
The limousine is the film’s one constant space. It is a dressing room, where he makes himself up and unmakes himself, driven through the city by a woman who keeps the schedule. Céline is his only colleague, and the car is the only place the film returns to as he does. The genres change between appointments as the roles change, thriller to monster film to family drama, and the shape of the film is the shape of his day.
Movement III
In the cemetery of Père-Lachaise Oscar is Merde, a lurching creature, and he runs through the graves to Akira Ifukube’s theme from Godzilla, eating the flowers left on them. Merde is the wild man, the beast who carries off beauty, a monster loose among the dead. He is not borrowed: he has a film of his own behind him, Carax’s part of Tokyo! (2008).
He abducts Kay M, played by Eva Mendes. He cuts her dress into a burqa, and then lies naked and aroused with his head in her lap, as in a pietà. The grotesque is raised to an icon, and the comedy and the horror of the scene do not cancel each other. It is one of the five heights of the film, and the strangest.
Another appointment brings the role into a family. Oscar, as a father, collects his daughter Angèle from a party and drives her home. In the parked car he is quietly cruel to her; in substance he tells her that her punishment is to be herself. It is the scene where the lie hurts, because a child is on the other side of it, and nothing in it tells her that her father is playing.
Movement IV
In a church, as an entr’acte, Lavant takes up an accordion and walks, and other players join him, a growing band of accordions marching through the nave in one tracking movement. Nothing in it belongs to the story, and it is the purest lift in the film: an actor’s body given over to rhythm, filmed as a dance. Then the day resumes.
In a warehouse Oscar is Alex, a killer, and the man he kills there is his double; the face is carved with a blade, and the prosthetic shows. Later, at a café terrace, an assassin shoots a banker and is shot himself: the killing of a likeness again, in a lower key. The film rhymes with itself, two bankers and two doubles, and the roles begin to turn on the man who plays them.
Between appointments a man with a birthmark, played by Michel Piccoli, is waiting in the limousine. He asks Oscar why he goes on, and is told: “la beauté du geste” (the beauty of the act). Beauty, it is answered, lies in the eye of the beholder, and the fear under the exchange is that there are no more beholders: the cameras have become too small to see. In the next appointment Oscar is Monsieur Vogan, dying in a hotel room, with his niece Léa, played by Elise Lhomeau, at his bedside.
Movement V
Then, unscheduled, Oscar meets Jean, played by Kylie Minogue, a woman from his past, who has an appointment of her own at the same hour. They walk through the shuttered Samaritaine, the great store gutted and full of mannequins, and she sings “Who Were We?”, written for the film. Then a fall from the roof. Under the roles there was a past, and it cannot be replayed.
The last appointment of the day is a home. Oscar walks into a house, and the wife and daughter waiting for him are chimpanzees; this, too, is on the dossier. Céline drives the limousine to the Holy Motors garage, where the cars are put away for the night, and alone she puts on a white mask, the mask Scob wore for Georges Franju in 1960. When she has gone the limousines, in the dark, talk to one another.
The film had wide critical standing from its first showing, and it has been argued over since: as an elegy for celluloid, an allegory of acting, Carax’s autobiography, a film about digital surveillance. It renewed a career that Les Amants du Pont-Neuf had nearly ended and led to Annette (2021). No line of films descends from it; its manner is too personal to be taken up. What it made is a day of roles for no visible camera, carried in one car through one city, and the question it leaves is the one asked in the limousine: whether the act is still beautiful when there may be no one left to see it.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test is where an episodic form is weakest, and the film meets it with a frame that is required: one day, one car, one dossier, so that each role is labour and the day is a life. Most appointments carry a separate part of the argument. The motion-capture session takes the image away from the actor’s labour; the father brings the role into the family, where the lie hurts; the double killed in the warehouse turns the roles on the man; the Samaritaine breaks the system with a real past; and the set pieces hold no idle shots. What gives: the beggar on the bridge is a sketch, the café killing repeats the warehouse in a lower key, and the order of the middle appointments is not compelled.
Score: 8.2 / 10
What is brought into the open can be stated. A life made of roles performed on schedule, for an employer one never sees and an audience that may not exist, is still lived, and costs the body that plays it. In the limousine the man with the birthmark asks why Oscar goes on and is told “la beauté du geste” (the beauty of the act); the fear under it is that there are no beholders left. The cameras have shrunk out of sight and performance goes on with nothing visibly recording it: the condition of a life under digital observation, not only of cinema. Under the roles lies a past that cannot be replayed. Held a tenth below the gate: much of the power is elegy, and employer and audience are kept abstract, so the social condition is posed more than opened.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Elevation is frequent and of many kinds, and frequency is what the axis asks. Merde’s run through Père-Lachaise to Akira Ifukube’s Godzilla theme, eating the flowers from the graves, ending in a pietà with Kay M: the grotesque raised to icon. The motion-capture dance, two bodies in black with points of light becoming serpents on a screen. The entr’acte, Lavant leading a growing band of accordions through a church in one tracking movement, the purest lift in the film. Kylie Minogue singing “Who Were We?” among mannequins in a gutted store. Céline’s white mask at the end of the day. Five heights, each of a different kind. Held from the top by the flatter passages between them, the beggar and the café, and by a coda that lands as a wry shrug.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The myth is built, and the structure bears its weight. The man of many shapes passes through bodies in a single day, from waking to a last home; the white car is a hearse, Céline a ferrywoman, Paris a city of the dead, and Père-Lachaise and the dying Vogan make the passage load-bearing. Merde is the wild man, the beast who carries off beauty, made and not cited, with a film of his own behind him (Tokyo!, 2008). The doubles killed in the warehouse and at the café build the self murdered by its likeness into the plot. Held from the top because much of the archetypal matter comes through the history of cinema itself (Franju, Marey, Godzilla, the musical), myth evoked through the medium rather than built in the particular.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The inheritance is the European art film of the episodic and the oneiric: Buñuel’s The Phantom of Liberty (1974) and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), Cocteau’s poet passing through mirrors, Franju, Lynch, Ruiz; and Carax’s own romantic cinema, built on Lavant. The turn abandons plot and character for one actor’s tour through the genres on a single frame, and makes the absent camera its subject, which the episodic tradition did not have. The stake was real: thirteen years without a finished feature since Pola X, a career nearly ended by Les Amants du Pont-Neuf, a small budget and a lead no longer bankable. Held below the top because the episodic dream film is a proven path, and the turn is more of manner and frame than of the medium.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. Its knowledge is that a life is a sequence of roles without a visible audience, and the form is exactly such a sequence: appointments joined only by the car and the dossier, played for a camera the film shows cannot be seen. The changes of genre are the changes of role, so the film’s shape is Oscar’s day. The limousine, where he makes himself up and unmakes himself between scenes, is the dressing room as the only constant space, and the film returns there as he does. An actor’s day told with motives and a named employer would turn the condition into a story about a job. Held from the top by the arbitrariness of number and order: the sequence could be reordered with little change in what it knows.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Evidentiary, and fourteen years deep, so the axis is part demonstration and part forecast. The questions have stayed open and argued: who the employer is; whether there are any beholders; which appointment, if any, is Oscar’s life, when the chimpanzee home is itself on the dossier; whether the Samaritaine is an appointment or an accident. The film has been read as an elegy for celluloid, as an allegory of acting, as Carax’s autobiography (he wakes in the prologue and opens the cinema with a key grown into his finger) and as a film about digital surveillance. The form yields on return in its rhymes: two bankers, two doubles, two masks. Held by span, and because some of the return is to the pleasure of the set pieces more than to a meaning that deepens.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Released in 2012, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is real: a film that makes the passing of the visible camera its subject at the moment digital capture replaced film, and shows that one performer can carry the whole range of cinema’s genres as one body’s labour. It is a summation of the medium’s history more than a reorganisation of what film could do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: wide critical standing from its first showing, a renewal of Carax’s career that led to Annette (2021), and a place in teaching and in writing on digital cinema. What it redirected is hard to name: no line of films descends from it, its manner too personal to be taken up.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Weighed on form, presence and fabric across fourteen years. The film as released survives whole, in one version, born digital, with nothing lost or replaced. Its presence has been continuous since 2012, in repertory, on home video and streaming and in teaching, wide for an art film of its year though not of the widest kind. The digital image is of its moment and the film is about that moment, so its surface ages as subject rather than as fashion; but a film whose argument is the shrinking of cameras is fixed in part to a technical transition already passed, a small charge. Fourteen years is a short demonstration, and survival demonstrated outranks survival predicted.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Command of the medium, and Lavant’s is the film’s load: eleven or more distinct bodies, each with its own gait, voice and weight, from the bent beggar to Merde’s lurching run to the father’s quiet cruelty in a parked car, and an accordion walk that is a dancer’s. Caroline Champetier’s digital photography makes Paris at night a lit interior and holds the entr’acte in one sweeping movement. The gutted Samaritaine and the limousine dressing room are made into places. Édith Scob is exact in very little; Nelly Quettier’s cutting keeps the appointments distinct. The costs are real: the warehouse killing is staged awkwardly and its prosthetic face-carving looks like what it is; Eva Mendes is given a pose rather than a role; the talking limousines are unevenly executed.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Merde’s rampage in the cemetery, monstrous and comic, and the hushed song at the Samaritaine, a love story with a death in it. One law governs both: every scene is a role played on schedule, and Merde and Jean are both keeping appointments. The law holds across the father, the double and the deathbed, over a range from monster film to musical, and the wider the range, the more the axis credits it. It strains at the edges, where the film puts its argument: the talking limousines in the garage extend the law from people to machines in a register of whimsy the rest does not use, and the chimpanzee family is either the law’s last joke or a break with it. The law is stretched, not broken.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Judged on what a film of about 115 minutes holds. Consciousness, in one man who may have none of his own left; the family, twice, in the father and Angèle and in the chimpanzee home; labour, the whole film being a working day for an unseen employer, with a dossier, a driver and a fear of retirement; money and power, in the bankers and their bodyguards; death, in Vogan and the cemetery; love, in Jean; the city, from bridge to cemetery to department store; technology, from Marey to motion capture. They are held together through one day. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: the state and the social order appear only as an employer without a face, history only as cinema’s history, and the sacred only as a church used for an accordion march.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.4 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Swerve at 8.8, then The Sublime and The Living Form at 8.7. A turn from plot and character to one actor’s tour through the genres, with the absent camera as its subject, made at the real risk of a career; elevation five times over and each of a different kind, grotesque, erotic, kinetic, lyric and uncanny; and a form that is exactly a sequence of roles without a visible audience, with the car as the one constant room.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.8: consciousness, the family, labour, money, death, love, the city and technology are held through one day, while the state appears as a faceless employer, history only as cinema’s own and the sacred only as a church used for a march. Above it, Pressure on Tradition and The Imperishable at 8.0: a summation of the medium more than a reorganisation of it, with no line of films descending, and a survival of fourteen years, whole but short, on a surface tied in part to a passing technology.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.2 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.7, The Made at 8.4, The Inner Law at 8.2, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on three axes: The Swerve at 8.8 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 8.4 falls a tenth short, and Pressure on Tradition and The Imperishable, each at 8.0, fall five tenths short. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.0, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.8. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The summit is withheld by the Epochal Gate and by the aggregate, 8.4 from a sum of 100.2, below the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Holy Motors as released in 2012, about 115 minutes, in its one version, from the sleeper of the prologue to the cars in the garage: written and directed by Leos Carax, photographed by Caroline Champetier, edited by Nelly Quettier, produced by Pierre Grise Productions (Martine Marignac and Maurice Tinchant) as a French and German coproduction, with Denis Lavant, Édith Scob, Eva Mendes, Kylie Minogue, Elise Lhomeau, Jeanne Disson and Michel Piccoli. No other cut is known, so no choice of version arises. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. Every axis is judged on the original, in French with some English; subtitles are a reader’s aid rather than the object, and nothing here is charged to them. One phrase of dialogue is held to the word and quoted in the original with the desk’s English; other speech is described, and the father’s words to his daughter are given in substance only. Details that could not be verified are not given, among them a second credited cinematographer, the further coproduction partners, the production designer, several pieces of the music and their makers, a dedication at the close, the number and exact order of the appointments, the inscriptions on the cemetery’s tombs, what the cars say in the garage, and the film’s places in critics’ lists.