Pola X (1999)
Directed by Leos Carax

Film Review

Les Amants du Pont-Neuf (1991) may have been a major critical success and a career-defining work but for its director, thirty year old Leos Carax, its prodigious overspend and protracted production schedule left deep scars that would take a long time to heal.  It was eight years before Carax attempted to make another feature-length film, and when he did so that film - the enigmatically titled Pola X - revealed much about his personal angst and revulsion for his earlier work.  In the intervening years, Carax had matured and become far more critical of himself and the world around him.   The catalyst for this transformation was the Bosnian War in the early to mid 1990s, which had a profound impact on the young filmmaker.  He spent several months in Bosnia, witnessing for himself the terrible humanitarian disaster which the West was apparently unable to come to grips with.  It was another Holocaust, another attempt by one group of people to wipe out another, and yet no one seemed to care.  This monstrous indifference was the inspiration for Pola X, Carax's most personal, most self-indulgent and possibly most worthy film.

Pola X is a modern interpretation of a story by Herman Melville entitled Pierre, or The Ambiguities, first published in 1852.  The film derives its name from the acronym of the novel's French language title  - Pierre Ou Les Ambiguïtés - with X denoting the fact that the screenplay went through ten drafts.  Melville's book was scandalous for its time and remains one of the author's least known and least understood works.  Carax takes the essence of Melville's lurid Gothic satire and, bringing it forward a hundred and fifty years, turns it into a dark and twisted commentary on life in Western Europe at the end of the 20th century.

Here, Carax seasons his obvious revulsion for the West's apathy towards the Bosnian situation (and ill-regard for immigrants/refugees in general) with an honest and typically flamboyant expression of his own personal struggle for artistic integrity.  The fragmentary nature of the world as Carax sees it - rigidly divided into the haves and the have-nots, those who belong and those who do not - is reflected in the fragmented personality of the central protagonist Pierre (a character clearly fashioned after Carax's own hard-to-pin-down likeness).  When we first see Pierre (no other actor was better suited for the role than Guillaume Depardieu), he is like something out of a children's fairytale, living the gracious life in a castle with his beautiful regal mother (Catherine Deneuve, naturellement).  Pierre has made his name as a writer and is about to wed a girl of divine beauty.  His life is the very acme of human happiness - and then it is suddenly torn from him, his identity shattered through a chance encounter with a fugitive of the Bosnian conflict who claims to be his sister.

After a weirdly Gothic encounter, a long monologue which makes up the strangest and most poetic sequence of any Leos Carax film, Pierre suddenly finds he is another person, living in another world.  Gone is the castle and its verdant countryside setting.  Now he finds himself in the midst of Stygian nightmare, an outsider in Paris's lower depths, coping with insecurity and rejection.  Now he is on the other side of the fence, experiencing life at its most raw and unjust.  Like the Bosnian refugee girl he is soul-bonded to, he is a mere unwanted fragment of human detritus.  He hardly seems to exist.  In fact he doesn't.  Welcome to life on the margins.

As Pierre's physical and mental state worsen, so the film becomes increasingly unhinged, prone to the kind of wild auteur excesses that even Carax would have shied away from in former years.  Bizarre dream sequences punctuate a brazenly unfocussed narrative that becomes ever more unreal and disjointed, and exhilarating as this chaotic joyride is, it is profoundly unsettling.  Mixed feelings of revulsion and sympathy creep into your veins as you watch Pierre go through his insane ritual of purification - reaching for some glimmer of truth in the darkness, but becoming more of the ignorant savage as he does so, the trammels of bourgeois conditioning slipping off him like layers of dead skin from a snake.  The tragedy is that Pierre's painful process of spiritual cleansing and consequent self-martyrdom lead no where.  A man loses his mind and the world remains as insane as ever.

The casting of Guillaume Depardieu as the self-destructive artist Pierre is as inspired as it is eerily prophetic.  Like Pierre, Depardieu was born to the privileged life and seemed destined to follow in his father Gérard's footsteps to become one of his generation's most respected screen actors.  But fame, easy money and professional success were never enough for Depardieu Junior and his adult life was marked by crisis, controversy and misfortune, culminating in his premature death in 2008 at the age of 37.  Guillaume Depardieu's fall was by no means as perverse and spectacular as that of the character he plays so vividly in Carax's film, but it is curious how one should mirror the other.  This lends a deeper poignancy to Pola X which it certainly didn't have when it was first seen.

Not long after the film's cinematic release in 1999 (when it met with a mixed critical reaction and was not a commercial success), Leos Carax developed a longer version, which was aired on the French-German television channel Arte in 2001.  Divided into three episodes, this was titled Pierre ou les ambiguïtés and has an extra forty minutes of content.  A stark visual allegory which shows Carax at his most daring and politically involved, Pola X provides a mocking but apt fresco of our time - and, a decade and a half after it was made, how remarkable, and how depressing, that it should have an even greater resonance.  The fissure that divides our civilisation still exists, and it grows wider and deeper each day.

Film Synopsis

Pierre is a successful young writer who enjoys a privileged, carefree existence with his mother Marie at their grand Normandy château.  He is soon to be married to Lucie and he fills his empty hours by working on his second novel.  One evening, Marie casually informs her son that she has fixed the date of his wedding, and he duly hurries off to tell his fiancée.  As he crosses a forest in darkness a woman's voice calls out to him.  A dishevelled girl appears out of the gloom and insists that she is his forgotten sister.  As Isabelle tells her tragic tale, Pierre realises that she is his father's illegitimate daughter, the result of a liaison with an East European woman when he was serving as a French diplomat.  With a suddenness that shocks those closest to him, Pierre turns his back on his comfortable bourgeois life and moves to Paris to live with Isabelle.  Unable to find a hotel willing to accommodate illegal immigrants, Pierre and Isabelle end up living in a cold, squalid warehouse, where they pursue an intense love affair.  As Pierre labours intensely on his novel his mental state deteriorates further and he is haunted by strange visions.  He is driven over the edge when he learns that his best friend Thibault has betrayed him...