Holy Motors — Begin in a dream (at least, call it a dream) of pushing through a forest wall into the balcony of a movie theater; a child, or a dog, walks on the red-carpeted aisle below. The audience pays no attention. A girl watches through a window.

“Goodbye, Papa!” You are stout and grey, and you walk down the driveway of a compound where men stand on the rooftops. “Good morning, Monsieur Oscar,” says the driver of your limo, an elegant, tall blonde d’un certain age. So that is your name.

There are nine appointments today. In the limo, you dress for the first one, and emerge as a hunchbacked gypsy woman with a cane and a cup. You walk away from the limo and find yourself on a bridge, where you panhandle, muttering aloud — or maybe to yourself? No one stops. No one even sees.

Back in the car, you strip it all away. You are no longer the gypsy woman–what’s more, you are no longer stout or grey, but wiry and shaven bald. For each of your appointments, you will don prosthetics, clothes, years, emotions. You will commit acts of violence, some savage, some skilled, some simply by dint of parenting, some by way of motion capture. You will murder; you will die. You will repeat your lines.

It will emerge that you are performing, seemingly for cameras smaller than the eye can see. This idea of a total theater is complicated by some of its impossible effects: how is it that you can confront a man who resembles you entirely? Your patron appears in the limo, neither exiting nor entering. He suggests your heart isn’t in it.

Your heart… by some chance, your limo bangs into another performer’s. The two of you steal what appears to be a genuine moment — itself an aria sung from a balcony — before she gives a performance that appears to be her last.

Is this a world of total surveillance? Is it our own? Is the self a prison which only your costly exertions can obliterate? Is the home you start in and the different one you end in an impossible odyssey, a parody of permanence in a Heraclitean river of a life?

***

Merry Christmas, AUFS! Have some additional cheer.