Director: Leos Carax
"I perceive Pierre in the same way that I perceive my own life: I understand both 'poorly' but I'm obliged to explore them. that's what a project it: a heavy question mark. You're the dot under the mark and you mustn't let it crush you." Leos Carax
Pola X, the new film by Leos Carax, is about a young man whose quest for the truth leads him to confuse the desires of his dreams with the realites of his mental breakdown. Both in subject matter and in execution the film reaches for greatness but due to its length and a few lapses in narrative logic it doesn’t entirely succeed.
Based on a Herman Melville novel ("Pierre or the Ambiguities") the film is about Pierre (Guillaume Depardieu) a confused, rich young writer who is about to be married. But when a mysterious woman named Isabella (Katerina Golubeva) -- who he’s only seen in his dreams -- enters his life he flips out and decides to run off with her. If this sounds like a familiar plot line it really isn’t; because the woman he meets is his sister and the reason he runs away with her is because she represents a part of himself that has been missing for years.
With his new found liberation Pierre begins living an ascetic life with Isabella in an artistic, hippie commune where he becomes a total disheveled, penniless wreck. Amazingly his fiancée follows him and starts to live in the same commune. Now he has two women and (not necessarily because of it) -- he looses his mind.
It’s pretty clear to us that Pierre is working out his mental problems on his own because Isabella doesn’t do or say much of anything. She is a feral, pale skinned woman who – not unlike a fashion model -- represents a femme fatale-type that quietly lurks in the shadows. The obvious question that’s never really answered is why, if they are brother and sister, they embark on a doomed sexual relationship.
Pola X is an odd movie because the motivations are not easy for many (or any) audience members to relate to, yet within the context of the story it seems to make sense. In an early scene we see that Pierre and his mother (played by the still beautiful Catherine Deneuve) have what seems to be closeness related to incest. And in a later scene we see that he hangs on his cousin as if they too were once sexually linked.
The movie both succeeds and fails because of the film’s ambiguity. It’s an involving mysterious drama about a man’s search for truth and identity but it doesn’t give us enough to make us understand why he chooses the path he does. Carax dangles the story in front of us without much explanation thus making us fill in the missing parts to complete the film’s meaning.
Pola X will puzzle those who enjoy it and anger those who don’t, but because it features some splendidly cinematic moments, beautiful poetic interludes and one highly charged genuinely erotic sex scene, it’s a film few will forget.
- Matt Langdon
