Pola X

'I don't see myself as part of a generation. I don't feel I have anything in common with other French directors.'
- Leos Carax

After leaving school at 16, Leos Carax came to Paris not knowing anyone and, like the nouvelle vague generation before him, became an obsessive visitor at the Paris Cinematheque, where he discovered two distinctive lines of filmic-technique- silent cinema especially D W Griffith and early Jean-Luc Godard, whose work he paid homage to in his first two films.

The first Carax features were low-key. Boy meets Girl (1985) a black and white story of Paris nightlife, was, in an elegant morose fashion, essentially what the title suggested. Together with cinematographer Jean-Yves Escoffier, he went on to make, in 1986, Mauvais Sang, a visually extravagant and narratively audacious series of sequences about love and a mysterious virus.Carax's now infamous next film, Les Amants Du Pont-Neuf was a feverishly romantic drama of homeless young lovers. The film went spectacularly over-budget , after an accident delayed shooting for months, with the director eventually forced to construct an elaborate full-scale replica of Paris's famous bridge in the South of France.

After five months production it was shut down because of spiralling costs. In mid-1989, after a Swiss producer stepped in, production resumed, only to be suspended once again. The film was only finally completed when Jack Lang, then France's arts minister intervened, declaring the film would be a 'national asset'. The final budget was reportedly approaching 160m francs! Despite a massive media furore, the film was not a box-office success. However, subsequently, it has become something of a cult-masterpiece.

It is fair to say that Carax's 'long anticipated' follow-up film, Pola X (1999) was therefore keenly awaited. It delivers doom, grand passion, motorbikes and a fragmented lyrical poetic spectacle. Carax's act of hubris and commercial perversity is both a preposterously self-indulgent fiasco and an improbable triumph of romantic audacity. In updating and transposing to contemporary France, Herman Melville's 1852 novel Pierre, or the Ambiguities - the story of a young celebrity writer who abandons his moneyed lifestyle when confronted with a secret from his family past and subsequently drops out into obscurity - one might see a resemblance to the director, who virtually disappeared from the film world after Les Amants du Pont Neuf, was controversially critically received.

Born in 1961 in Suresnes outside Paris, Alexander Oscar Dupont - Leos Carax is an anagram of Alex Oscar - hails from a background similar to that of Pierre. Carax has indicated that the book has been an important touchstone to him for many years and it is possible to discern some degree of over-identification with Melville's critical and commercial misfortunes. The film's title, an anagram of the book's French title (Pierre, ou les Ambiguities), foregrounds the act of adaptation, highlighting the act of authorial will. On one level the film is an unmistakable and masochistic act of self-parody comparable to Melville's. On another level, the film, in all its deranged grandeur, represents a defiant refusal to capitulate to the dictates of commerce after the 'failure' of Les Amants du Pont-Neuf and nearly ten years in the wilderness.

Pola X is a fantastic clash of energies, a remarkable, deeply unsettling and original piece of work. Beautifully constructed and majestically seductive in design, Carax invests his entire being as a film-maker into it. Each image and each scene possesses a force and an enigma that is visually arresting. The central discourse that animates Carax's work revolves around one of life's elemental questions: What does love possibly mean in the contemporary world? Carax remains a singular talent with a unique feel for poetry, space and movement. The short construction in 'Pola X' transmutes a shock of surprise, possibility and emotional intensity. Carax's visual style (aided by cinematographer Eric Gautier) is one of the most seductive in current cinema: cool and beautifully transparent. His shots frame the actors with a crystalline precision, while apparently discordant sequences are punctuated by flights of poetic sensation.

Narratively Pola X begins in present day France. Pierre Valombreuse (Guillaume Depardieu) lives in Normandy with his mother Marie (Catherine Deneuve) in their family chateau on the Seine. They are beautiful, rich and carefree. Pierre, author of the best selling novel 'In the Light' divides his time between visiting his fiancée Lucie (Delphine Chuillot) and writing his second novel. When Lucie's brother Thibault (Laurent Lucas) returns after a long absence, he and Pierre have an uneasy encounter. One night, Marie tells Pierre she has sent a date for his wedding to Lucie. Pierre immediately sets off to tell Lucie the news. On the way, at the edge of a dark forest, a mysterious woman of mournful beauty appears in his headlights. Isabelle (Katerina Golubeva) describes the atrocities she has witnessed in an unspecified Eastern European country and explains she is the illegitimate daughter of his late father, a celebrated diplomat, long kept a secret by Marie. At first Pierre is incredulous, but gradually he accepts her story and aims to right this injustice.

Stunned, Pierre renounces his former life - his mother, his fiancée, the chateau - and leaves for Paris with Isabelle and her companions, the refugee Razerka and her young daughter. His sister is a catalyst for Pierre's 'escape' from his old life. Through her he discovers the world: its lies, ambiguities and masquerades. After the death of Razerka's daughter, Pierre and Isabelle seek refuge in the ghostly suburbs of Paris among a group/cult. Here he is left alone to concentrate on his writing - 'a great book of Truth'.

Marie dies in a motorcycle accident. Lucie finds Pierre, but gradually realises he and Isabelle are now lovers. Pierre completes his manuscript but his publisher rejects it. Distraught and deranged Pierre steals a gun and tracks down Thibault and kills him. As he is being led away by the police, Isabelle throws herself in front of an emergency vehicle and is killed.

Mysterious and miraculous Pola X refuses to adhere to conventional boundaries - Carax develops to an extreme abstract,/fragmented editing techniques. At the same time more than in any of his previous films, Carax invests the narrative with a highly charged subtext. Pierre's relationship with his mother and Thibault are visibly fraught with intimations of prior/latent sexual interest. Pierre and Marie address one another as 'brother' and 'sister' and enjoy an unusual level of intimacy. Pierre's blonde 'cipher-fiancée' Lucie and the dark enigmatic Isabella appear equally passive manifestations of Pierre's implicit psychosexual crisis.

Lucie represents a simple projection of Pierre's introverted narcissistic persona, as his cousin and mirror image of his mother; she reflects the desire to 'possess' Marie herself. Isabelle, in contrast, is a projection of Pierre's guilt and self-hatred - a return of the repressed in both personal and historical terms. As his half-sister, she offers the possibility to indulge his desire for an unnatural/incestuous relationship. Simultaneously she is a reproachful spectre, an incarnation of the unspeakable suffering that has characterised a century of European genocide in which Pierre's father and his class are implicated.

This polemic is made manifest in the film's stunning prologue montage: an image of the earth from space accompanied by a voice-over quoting Hamlet - 'The time is out of joint…' - smash-cuts to dropping bombs. From this Carax cuts to the idilic Valombreuse estate, making explicit the connection to privilege/exploitation and the horror of twentieth century war.

In contrast Carax remains non-judgmental of both Pierre's aristocratic 'paradise' and the cold urban industrial 'hell' he falls to. In fact one aspect of the film's remarkable formal structure is its bold use of visuals to balance the two realms.

In one of the film's pivotal scenes, Isabelle's extensive monologue explaining her back-story as she and Pierre progress through the woods at twilight, Carax tests legibility and exposition to the extreme - its visual liminality becomes a metaphor for the contradictions that are personified in Carax's uniquely self-defeating talent. His narrative and formal audacity are ultimately indistinguishable from failure.

Carax's films are intense, overpowering, personal outpourings of emotions. Though his cinematic style owes much to the improvisational elliptical manner of the French nouvelle vogue of the 1960s, his sensibility is based in nineteenth century French Romanticism. There are sequences in Pola X that are breathtaking in their poetic density, and scenes complimented by an ineffable touch of a cinematic grace that haunt the imagination.

Reviewed by Adrian Gargett