dvd of the week
I missed this wildly weird French movie when it was playing in San Diego this fall, but I saw it on DVD this past week and I was amazed. Leos Carax’s hypnotic, fascinating, and somewhat opaque film follows Oscar (Denis Lavant) as he goes from appointment to appointment in Paris, driven in a white limo by Celine (Edith Scob).
At each stop, he transforms himself, from a homeless woman to an assassin, from a dying old man to a cruel and worried father. Each appointment is like its own short film, and what is tying them all together is not clear, but the trips between are full of Oscar’s pathos and Celine’s doting and some moral, existential, perhaps cosmic meaning.
I haven’t enjoyed being this confused since I saw Mulholland Drive, and Carax may be as gifted a director as David Lynch.
