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When writing about Leos Carax, Reader emeritus film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum has often compared the director to Jean Cocteau, another French artist who approached filmmaking as a vehicle for autobiographical poetry. Cocteau, of course, did much more than make movies: he wrote poems, novels, essays, and plays, choreographed ballets, and worked in a variety of visual arts. In all of these forms, he advanced a symbolist aesthetic that drew from classical mythology as well as his own dreams. His films, like Carax’s current release Holy Motors, can be narcissistic and stubbornly inscrutable, though they’re seldom ever boring. (It’s worth noting that some of his straightforward melodramas, like The Eagle With Two Heads and Les Parents Terribles, are masterpieces of the form.) No Cocteau film proves this better than his last, The Testament of Orpheus (1960), which the artist describes at the start as “a striptease act, [which] gradually peel[s] away my body to reveal my naked soul.”
