It won over audiences as Cannes this year, where it took out the Prix de la Jeunesse (Award of the Youth). Now Sydney Film Festival has announced a last minute addition to the festival’s premieres: Leos Carax’s Holy Motors.
From SFF: French filmmaker Leos Carax (The Night Is Young, Lovers on the Bridge) took Cannes by storm last month with this cyclone of cinematic invention, receiving rapturous praise from critics and audiences alike and making a dark-horse charge at the Palme d’Or. Carax, whose previous feature was 1999’s Pola X, has let loose a pent-up explosion of ideas, colour and subversive weirdness. An intoxicating blend of science fiction, song and dance, romance and carnival-funhouse dada pranksterism, Holy Motors is confounding and dazzling in equal measure, earning comparisons to David Lynch, Lewis Carroll, Tron and Metropolis. With vaudevillian genius (and the help of elaborate costumes and makeup), French character actor Denis Lavant inhabits no less than 11 roles as he is driven about a digitally transformed fantasy Paris by his chauffer (the brilliant Edith Scob) in an odyssey that is both espionage and performance, and overtly a metaphor for our ever-changing online existences.
Holy Motors will screen on 14 June 2012 at the Sydney Film Festival. It will also be released in Australia on 23 August 2012 from Icon.
