Pola X

Based on Herman Melville's story. Director Carax, who can be mesmerising when he is good, makes this film unbelievably trashy. Stay away.

And surprise, surprise--for some unfathomable reason Carax deviates from Melville's ending where there are three suicides instead of one as chosen by Carax in the film.

Even then it is a disaster of a film--Catherine Deneuve's time on the screen is the only saving grace.

I had just returned from France and was craving a French film to take the edge off the end of a vacation. However, Pola X was the most disjointed and pretentious film I've seen in years. It felt like a bad parody of the genre -- bleak, stilted dialogue; freaky feral-women; and oh the agonizingly beautiful angst of it all. The X in the title apparently refers to the 10th rewrite of the script. One wishes he'd had the insight to take it to 11.

When Leos Carax's film POLA X premiered in 1999, it was seen then as part of the New French Extremity movement, with critics and audiences picking up on its unsimulated sex scene. Yet that forms only a brief few minutes of quite ample film. Two decades on, audiences of today ought to look past the sensation and appreciate the film for what it really has to offer: a convincing contemporary take on Hermann Meville's psychological novel PIERRE, and the way Carax interweaves Melville's structure of 19th-century wealthy elites with harrowing references to contemporary France, Bosnia and the plight of Balkan refugees.

The son of a deceased diplomat of some note, Pierre (Guillaume Depardieu) lives in splendor in rural France, in a manor house with his widowed mother (Catherine Deneuve). Things are going well for young Pierre: a novel he has written has become a bestseller and he is engaged to the lovely Lucie (Delphine Chuillot). But then he encounters a mysterious woman named Isabelle (Yekaterina Golubeva) who tells him in broken French that she is his half-sister, born to Pierre's diplomat father and an unknown Balkan woman. Isabelle is in fact less a character and more a spectral presence that haunts Pierre's life. Intrigued by this otherworldly creature, Pierre gives up his privileged existence and enters into a vividly depicted bohemianism that brings about his physical and mental decline.

POLA X prefers to tell its story more through visceral images than dialogue. In fact, the dialogue is deliberately stilted, allowing the film to dip in and out of its basis in Melville's 19th-century novel. So much of the story of Pierre's decline is told through the bucolic idyll of the first half of the film and the brutal squalor he later chooses. This imagery is so strong that even if POLA X feels somewhat too tentative about itself to rank as one of the all-time greatest films, it has haunted this viewer's thoughts since watching it.

Another nice touch of POLA X is the close way in which Carax worked with the composer of the film's score Scott Walker, who was then fresh from his acclaimed album TILT. When Pierre leaves home after meeting Isabelle, he enters into a bizarre community of artists in an industrial setting, who seem to be hiding sinister plans behind their avant-garde work. It is here that Walker's score goes from the subdued strings of the first half of the film into brasher, more aggressive sounds. Carax has set things up so this music is both diegetic and non-diegetic, part of the outside narration of Pierre's psychological decline and contemporary political strife as much as the film's action itself.

This movie starts off somewhat slowly and gets running towards the end. Not that that is bad, it was done to illustrate character trait degression of the main character. Consequently, if you are not into tragedies, this is not your movie. It is the thought provoking philosophy of this movie that makes it worthwhile. If you liked Dostoyevsky's 'Crime and Punishment," you will probably like this if only for the comparisons. The intriguing question that the movie prompts is, "What is it that makes a renowned writer completely disregard his publicly-aproved ideas for another set?" The new ideas are quite opposed to the status quo-if you are a conservative you will not like this movie.

Besides other philosophical questions, I must admit that the movie was quite aesthetically pleasing as well. The grassy hillsides and beautiful scenery helped me get past the slow start. Also, there was use of coloric symbolism in representing the mindstate of the main characters. If these sorts of things do not impress you, skip it. Overall I give this movie a 7.

What to say? The film is overdone, for sure, but I can't agree with criticism of the lack of naturalism in the film. It's melodramatic, yes, it's over-the-top, yes, it's self-important, yes, but for all that, I think it ends up telling a story with interest and passion that would be very difficult to tell except in this way. It's a story about a certain, highly Romantic worldview that, yes, is basically horseshit, but at least Carax is honest with his audience about where that kind of self-aggrandizement leads.

What almost saves the film from total pretentiousness is the fact that Pierre must lie in the bed he has made for himself. If one demands so much "truth" out of life, if one rejects anything with the slightest tinge of falsehood about it, then that is yet another ridiculous attitude. And by that I mean, yes, in the end Pierre is ridiculous, but maybe that's Carax's point?

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe he does end up as a Romantic hero in the end. And maybe it's not so original for that reason.