Pure audacity at twenty-four frames per second (or whatever the digital projection equivalent might be), French director Leos Carax’s fifth feature film, and first since 1999’s Pola X, is a meta examination of the art of creativity, both in the ways people transform identities across their daily lives and in the elaborate, beautiful artifice of cinema. Or so it seems. Part of the grand appeal of Holy Motors is its stubborn, exuberant cryptic nature, challenging the viewer to make sense of its swirling senselessness. The kaleidoscope has been smashed against the pavement, and Carax practically dares his audience to try and reconstruct it, making something cogent out of a long night’s journey across a bounty of scenarios. The metaphors of the film are both plain as can be and elusive as a tendril of smoke in a high wind, often simultaneously. Denis Lavant plays a man ferried around Paris in a stretch limousine, applying different guises between stops, all to engage in heated debates, wistful romances or, in the film’s most arresting moment, the furious playing of an accordion at the head of an ad hoc marching band. The actor’s immersion into the different parts suggests less the commonly used comparison of a chameleon and more the tenaciousness of a bulldog, his exalted commitment the element that holds the whole film together.

Despite the lengthy span between completed features, Carax developed this film fairly quickly after extended efforts at other projects proved fruitless. Reportedly drawing inspiration from the separateness of the narratives in Tokyo!, the 2008 anthology film he contributed to (Lavant’s character from that effort, Mr. Merde, makes a return appearance in Holy Motors), Carax embraced the freedom of disconnection, pushing against storytelling boundaries and giving little shreds of ideas a loving home. Holy Motors is a film made with intellectual abandon, but formed into something truthful and satisfying by the cunning of an artist. By its very nature, it is a constant unfurling of surprise, right up to the flashing lights and resigned workplace conversation of its final scene.