Quote:
We follow 24 hours in the life of a being (DL) moving from life to life like a cold and solitary assassin moving from hit to hit. In each of these interwoven lives, the being possesses an entirely distinct identity: sometimes a man, sometimes a woman, sometimes youthful, sometimes old to the point of dying; sometimes destitute, sometimes wealthy. By turns murderer, beggar, company chairman, monstrous creature, worker, family man…Read More »
Driven around Paris by a loyal driver (Édith Scob), a mysterious man (Denis Lavant) dresses up in costumes and plays a number of strange, semiscripted roles.
Manohla Dargis wrote:
“Holy Motors,” from the French filmmaker Leos Carax, is a dream of the movies that looks like a movie of dreams. It is a reverie that begins, appropriately, with a seated audience waiting in the dark (like us) and then cuts to a dimly lighted room, where a man (Mr. Carax) rises from a bed that he shares with a dog. He lets the sleeping dog lie (no need for trouble just yet) and creeps over to a mysterious door hidden in a wall. With a strange metal key that’s apparently grafted to one of his fingers, he unlocks the door and — like Little Nemo tumbling into Slumberland, Dorothy crossing over the rainbow and Alice falling down the rabbit hole — leaves one world for another.Read More »
The face of an exhausted man breathing deeply, his face agitated and, nearby, the sea. A Buddhist monk walks barefoot and incredibly slowly through Marseille – so slowly, that his progress is barely perceptible and he becomes a calming influence in the midst of the town’s goings-on.
More like a performance or installation art project than an ‘art film’, “Le Voyage en Occident” (Xi you) is a follow-up to the 2012 short “Walker” or a kind of second segment, set in Marseille (South France – French Mediterranean coast).
Consisting of only 14 shots of varying lengths – from very brief to a centrepiece of approximately 20 minutes – the film shows two men, narratively unconnected, who finally come together in a sequence that shows off both actors’ physical skills and sense of timing.
Lee Kang-sheng, who features in all Tsai Ming-liang’s films, plays the monk with impressive energy. His uniform slow motion footsteps and devoted posture turn his performance into a veritable tour de force as he unswervingly makes his way from the coast to the market in Noailles (popular market with mixed communities people), like an illusion in his bright red robe. Xi You represents another edition of the director’s series of short films that expand Lee Kang-sheng’s thirty minute slow walking performance at Taipei’s National Theatre into a ‘slow walking expedition’. Unusual, brilliantly chosen camera angles provide a collage of various districts in Marseille, creating a hypnotic space in which this meditative peregrination becomes a surprising journey of discovery.Read More »