With previous films including Mauvais Sang and The Lovers on the Bridge, Leos Carax's characters were constantly on the brink of madness, or at least a disturbing single-mindedness. This is a trend that Carax continues and expands with Pola X. In this adaptation of Herman Melville's Pierre, or The Ambiguities, Carax depicts characters whose madness is palpable as their behavior becomes more and more erratic. Main character Pierre, a successful writer who lives in a mansion on a rambling estate with his perhaps too adoring mother, abandons his family and loving girlfriend Lucie in order to strike out on his own with Isabelle, a foreign vagrant who claims to be his sister. Things take a dark turn quickly as his sister's odd companions get him in trouble with everyone he meets and his relationship with Isabelle becomes sexual. At the same time, he has trouble with his writing and becomes intimately involved with an unexplained cult. Eventually it becomes clear that he has left his old life because he felt that his way of life was not true enough, though ironically he is repeatedly accused of being an impostor in his new life, something that never happened before he set out trying to embody the truth. Later on, things take a turn for the darkly comic as Pierre introduces Lucie to Isabelle as his cousin in order to allay her suspicion about his relationship with her—given their odd relationship, she logically ought to be just as worried about his attraction to a female with a family connection to him. After this point, however, all logic is abandoned as Pierre and Isabelle become more and more unhinged.
The problem with Pola X isn't just that it's generally inexplicable if not altogether incomprehensible because of rushed and underdeveloped characters and events, it's that Carax largely abandons the visual style he put to such great use in his earlier films, opting instead for a drab aesthetic that emphasizes the sordid misery of the characters' surroundings. Even the few unusual shots he employs here seem like half- hearted rehashes of better scenes in his previous films. Still, even lesser Carax is of some interest.
The problem with Pola X isn't just that it's generally inexplicable if not altogether incomprehensible because of rushed and underdeveloped characters and events, it's that Carax largely abandons the visual style he put to such great use in his earlier films, opting instead for a drab aesthetic that emphasizes the sordid misery of the characters' surroundings. Even the few unusual shots he employs here seem like half- hearted rehashes of better scenes in his previous films. Still, even lesser Carax is of some interest.