Turning his limousine into a theater box, a man transforms himself into a beggar, a killer, an old man, a CEO, a family man...

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In his luxurious white limousine, which he has turned into an authentic theater box, Oscar drives around Paris and appears on street corners with different identities: as a gypsy beggar on the Pont-Neuf; a contract killer; an agonized old man; a rich CEO with bodyguards; a family man; an artist covered with electrodes for an erotic show; a madman running through Père Lachaise cemetery, where he interrupts a photo shoot and kidnaps a model done up like Amy Winehouse and decks her out in a burka...

This mushy French-German coproduction served up by Leos Carax provides an allegory about the European Union: the French are in command with the Germans footing the bill thanks to collected taxes, since this pinnacle of intello-artistic pretention was financed in part by public funding. It's no surprise then that the viewer/taxpayer/indignado, after having paid not only a ticket to see this indigestible masquerade but also part of the movie's budget, comes out feeling like a sucker. Basically, Holy Motors is to cinema what the finances of Greece and Spain are to the rest of Europe: a disaster imposed by a self-proclaimed élite on proletarians who are left to recover for a long time afterwards.