Leos Carax
Pola X

Don't get me wrong. I'm not an avid fan of French cinema, but by pure, sheer coincidence, I find myself reviewing, after Ozon's work, a film directed and written by Alexandre Oscar Dupont, better known as Leos Carax. His debut dates back to 1983 with the short film "Boy meets girl," which earned him critical acclaim at Cannes, followed by "Mauvais Sang," "The Lovers on the Bridge," leading up to this "Pola X". The name alone, which might initially seem like that of a porn film, actually conceals a series of pseudo-intellectual conjectures that even calling pretentious is an understatement. Pola is, in fact, the acronym of the French translation of the title of one of Herman Melville's major works, "Pierre ou les ambiguités" from 1852, a dramatic story about a character deemed by literary critics as "The American Hamlet," which the director decides to transport into modern-day France, believing he's undertaking an outrageously original operation. The X was added by him to emphasize his deliberate highlighting of the turbulent aspects of the relationship between the two protagonists, convinced that a couple of steamy scenes could challenge public morality and suffice in creating a good film.

Guillame Depardieu is Pierre, a very wealthy writer of noble descent who lives in the family castle with his mother Marie, played by Catherine Deneuve, who is as ubiquitous in French cinema as Buy is in ours. Between the two, there's a strange relationship that drives the mother to have an overly protective attitude towards her son (already seen in the better "The Piano Teacher") to the point of choosing for him the wedding date with Lucie, his girlfriend. He jumps on his motorcycle to deliver the news to her, but along the way, he glimpses a woman in rags in the woods, deciding to follow her. She is Isabelle (Yecaterina Golubeva; "Twentynine Palms") who claims to be his half-sister raised in the Balkans, as evidenced by the hilariously forced Eastern accent of the voice actress. Pierre feels compelled to help her, but his choice is hindered by everyone, including his mother. He decides to move to Paris and live with his half-sister in precarious conditions. Between the two, an incestuous relationship develops, which Carax carefully reveals to the audience through a needlessly lengthy sex scene where she flaunts a pair of succulent (enhanced?) breasts and he waves a biblical baguette about 28 centimeters long that I mistook for an arm (myopia? But let's also say virile pride...). Meanwhile, searches are underway to find Pierre, and during the journey to Paris, Marie dies in an accident, and the only one to track him down is Lucie, who decides to live with the two. The story has a sad ending: Pierre kills a cousin who refused to host him and ends up in jail while Isabelle kills herself by throwing herself under a truck.

The film contains all the elements of a serious feature: Lucie's love for Pierre that allows her to side with him and live with his half-sister-lover, the morbid relationship between mother and son, the theme of the journey, the stranger, the triangle, incest, sacrifice, the fight against respectability—all seasoned with perpetually suffering characters, condemned by their emotions. But then what is it that doesn't quite work in this film? The lack of an underlying meaning to justify the aforementioned elements. While in Melville's novel the union between Pierre and the half-sister is identified as the allegory of the incestuous conjunction between good and evil, Carax's film boils down to a simple love story (?) ending in tragedy. Some might argue supporting the thesis that Pierre's descent into chaos due to the half-sister would be a political metaphor representing the Western world ruined by compassion towards citizens of less fortunate but more fortunate nations, but more than a thesis, it seems to me a way to save a film ultimately disappointing considering that the film's characters opposing the protagonist's choice are completely ignored (the cousin even meets a bad end, as already mentioned) by the protagonist himself, whose dramatic inner strength is exalted.

From a technical standpoint, the film gets lost in a series of sequences arrogantly trying to assume a certain artistic value without succeeding, as evidenced by the three-quarters of an hour spent watching Deneuve on a motorcycle searching for her son with hair in the wind and makeup dissolved from crying, an image suggesting irreproachable despair and titanic will but so overdone that over time it becomes tiring and excessive, a good twenty minutes spent by Depardieu chasing Golubeva through the woods in the dim light of moonbeams, a very baroque similarity to their estrangement that soon turns boring.

Nothing more to add in front of these 134 wasted minutes. Prohibited for those under 18 years of age, if that interests anyone....