I can’t say that I’ve been the biggest fan of Leos Carax’s films, but my smart little brother Steven Boone has an article in Capital New York about the director’s latest work, the fantasy drama Holy Motors, which has convinced me I need to catch up on it. Boone draws comparison between Carax’s take on the oft-brutal changes of our technological revolution with Chaplin’s meditation on the hardships the Industrial Revolution wrought a century ago. An excerpt:

“We’re at a cultural crossroads, those of us who live in countries where iPhones and social media mean something. We’re leaving behind a whole range of physical products forever, in favor of ones that exist only as data or abstractions. We’re crossing these precarious bridges on faith, or just resignation to the tools set before us as we scramble to survive.

What are we losing in the transfer? In Holy Motors, glimpses of ancient Etienne-Jules Marey motion photography and still-stunning Edith Scob (star of the 1960 French classic Eyes without a Face) as Lavant’s limo driver, seem to cry for continuity with the past.

Now that whole archives are trusted to ‘the Cloud,’ there’s as much risk of losing it all as there is promise in the way digital media smuggle history over to the very demographic that mega-corporations prefer to remain unawares, the youth. (Go to YouTube and witness all the awed teenagers commenting under classic silent movies.)  Carax is thinking about all that stuff in Holy Motors, pitting Lavant’s Lon Chaney makeup kit and costumes and absurdly luxurious limo against a world that suddenly moves faster than any vehicle, silently, invisibly, through data cables and air waves.”