See beyond and into other movies to find the truth...

The film is of the "surrealism" genre, so, if you are expecting it to be exclusively like any other genre, you will certainly be perplexed.

In both the prologue and epilogue, we see snippets of a naked dancing man from the pioneering filmmaker Eadweard Muybridge, who was the first to visually record the basics of humans in motion. "Holy Motors" is actors in motion (via limo and foot) who take us through several film genres: the street violence of a revenge action-thriller, with the murder of the banker; the musical, in which characters break out into song for no apparently logical reason; the monster movie, in which cannibalism and "beauty and the beast" merge with the "romanticism" of the Paris sewers (and even a bit of the Adult genre, with an erected penis); the domestic drama, with the father and daughter scene; the absurd family-chimpanze scene, which has echoes of Nagisa Ôshima's "Max mon amour" (1986); the dramatically poignant death scene between uncle and niece; the "switching identity," "is he or is he not really dead?" prototype of the warehouse stabbing-in-the-neck murder scene, etc., etc., etc. Even the accordion band number is called an "Entre'acte," like the orchestral intermission music in a long-form epic drama or musical of the 1960s and 1970s.

Let's face it: a great part of life is pretending and role-playing. It's like all of us are often "on assignment" and "keeping an appointment," assuming identities and playing characters that we have been societally conditioned to assume and play -- and these are even further scripted or programmed into us so we can improvise based on the films and TV that we have seen, books that we have read or music that we have heard Do we not learn how to express "love" from movies and TV or some other art form? And how many of us think that we are invincible because of James Bond movies, where we can literally "rise up like Lazarus" from deadly injuries that somehow miraculously DID NOT kill us? How many soldiers have been "propagandized" by war movies that blindsided them into battle where they got maimed or killed? Have you ever repeated a line of dialogue from a movie in real life? Or attempted to do a feat that you saw on TV, only to be injured as an result?

I only wish that the final scene of the talking limousines would have segued into animation like Pixar's "Cars" movies. What honest stories inanimate objects could tell about the foibles of human beings and our absurd, surreal behavior -- behavior that often mimics and borrows from movies and TV! Why, even a few of us might have actually been conceived in the back seat of a car at a drive-in movie, or on a bed or sofa while a movie played on TV in the background -- and probably following a seduction that echoed "love lines" from some flick or other.

To paraphrase someone who often knew what he was talking about: "All the world is a movie theatre, and its men and women are merely acting out their parts."