Pola X

I watched Pola X because Scott Walker composed the film score and I admire his music a lot. Frankly, I expected a somewhat pretentious and possibly incoherent French movie. I was wrong. The vision of the film quickly managed to engage my attention to the fullest - starting with the opening sequence, which shows black and white footage of military airplanes throwing bombs at graves at the sounds of music and Scott Walker's beautiful wailing voice. The film explores the identity crisis of Pierre (Guillaume Depardieu - a brilliant choice for the role) and his consequential (self-)destruction. The story is divided into two parts – the first depicts Pierre's carefree life in a beautiful house in the French countryside and the second follows his utter personal disintegration after he abandons everything and moves to Paris to live in squalor with his supposed half-sister. Both parts contain some amazingly stunning photography – the first very colorful and bright, the second utterly gloomy and nearly apocalyptic - adding up to a true aesthetic feast. Pola X is a fascinating and quite unique movie experience.

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.

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.

Imagine the 2,500 seat Lumiere Theatre at Cannes dead silent. No one breathed as the incestuous sex scene began.

Understandably, half of the audience applauded as others booed the close of this film. The innovations in sound are remarkable, and locations stunning, but the crawling pace of a youthful cult leader's slow descent and eventual destruction of everyone near to him is arduous business. Thankfully it is broken up by strange twists of circumstance which justify those tortured looks from monolithic Deneuve and Depardeiu. It's just a bit of a shame that such traditional shock elements (an exploding head, a beautifully choreographed motorcycle accident) are precisely what the audience lives for to lift the weight of the rest of the picture. Carax's reply to the press between long drags on a cigarette, "What explicit imagery?" told me the rest of the story.

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.