Cannes 2012: Kylie Minogue in Holy Motors, review Dir: Leos Carax; Starring: Denis Lavant, Edith Scob, Eva Mendes, Kylie Minogue. 115 mins. There is one film at Cannes this year that I have brooded over, picked at and replayed in my mind's eye more than all of the others combined. Improbably, it is the one that co-stars Kylie Minogue. The French director Leos Carax released his last feature film, Pola X, in 1999, and has struggled to get projects off the ground ever since; his most notable success being a contribution to the portmanteau film Tokyo!, made with Bong Joon-ho and Michel Gondry. But he has blazed back into town like a firestorm with Holy Motors, an exhilarating, lunatic odyssey that delves deep into the murky relationship between film and our dreams. Holy Motors stars the French actor and clown Denis Lavant as Monsieur Oscar, an odd job man who does some very odd jobs indeed. As the film begins we see him leaving a stylish, modernist mansion and waving goodbye to his children, although this is not the home or family to which he returns. Oscar is driven around Paris by his chauffeur Céline (Edith Scob) in a white limousine, which has a dressing room and make-up desk in the back. Here, he disguises himself as various outcasts and oddballs, including a put-upon suburban father, a scarred, knife-wielding assassin and a straggly-bearded, flower-eating buffoon called Monsieur Merde. After completing a task as each character - collecting his shy teenage daughter from a party as the father; carrying out a contract killing as the assassin; kidnapping a supermodel (Eva Mendes) and eating her hair as Monsieur Merde - Oscar returns to the limousine and is driven to the next job. How these jobs are connected or who is paying Oscar to do them is never explained, although we do learn that Oscar is far from the only person employed by the firm. Late in the film he meets another employee (Kylie Minogue), and she reminisces about a past romance by singing a show tune, co-written by Carax and Neil Hannon of The Divine Comedy. The film's neatly episodic structure allows Carax to nod towards all sorts of other films and cultural traditions without getting bogged down in any of them: it opens with a shot of a still, perhaps sleeping, cinema audience that harks back to King Vidor's The Crowd, and the limousine scenes call to mind the opening of David Lynch's equally dreamlike Mulholland Drive. The uproarious Mr Shit, meanwhile, is rooted in some of the stranger medieval French clowning traditions, and the assassination sequence features a must-keep-secret twist worthy of Kafka that drew whoops and cheers at the festival screening. But Holy Motors is so much more than an arthouse Greatest Hits tape, and purrs along the dark, deserted highways of the mind with a muscular, erotic charge that is all its own. Dreams don't merely become real here: they're commodified, fetishised, even monetised in the course of Oscar's job. In short, it is a film about the stuff of cinema itself, and is perhaps the strongest contender for the Palme d'Or yet. Follow Telegraph film on Twitter