Pierre has also written an incredibly successful novel, albeit, under the pseudonym Aladdin, giving him much in the way of acclaim and public interest and the offer from his publisher to create a follow-up. When we meet him, Pierre (Guillaume Depardieu) is living the good life, sharing the family house with his glamorous mother and about to be married to his beautiful fiancé. Carax moves the story from old New York to contemporary Paris, spending the first half of the film projecting a backdrop of sun-kissed gardens and stately manner houses as we are introduced to the spoilt and carefree existence of our young hero. Pola X is loose adaptation/up-date of Herman Melville's controversial novella, Pierre or the Ambiguities, the title here an acronym for the novel's original French title, while the "X" denotes the number of drafts the script went through. One wonders if these people are familiar with Carax's previous work at all.
FILM POLA X PROFESSIONAL
Time, however, has been less kind to the film in question with the general consensus of most viewers and professional critics being that Pola X is muddled, confusing, plodding and pretentious. As with films like Apocalypse Now, Blade Runner, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and the work of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, subsequent years have seen a re-appraisal of said film, with many people being drawn to Les Amants Du Pont-Neuf seeing it as some sort of flawed epic or a minor masterpiece showcasing the triumph of imagination and free-thinking independence during the last gasp of intelligent, daring and entirely unique European film making. Sadly, things didn't go to plan the eventual film - a wildly uneven though often quite captivating blend of romantic folly and violent social realism - went massively over-budget and over-schedule before finally limping out with a limited release almost half a decade after Carax had initially started the project. That particular film was supposed to be the one that would finally introduce Carax to a wider cinematic audience finding the filmmaker refining his usual themes and structural preoccupations with a larger budget and much in the way of creative freedom.
French Gothic is quite the insidious aesthetic, and POLA X might be the Frenchest thing ever made.As others have no doubt previously noted, 'Pola X' (1999) was the much anticipated return feature from former "cinema du look" stalwart and infant-terrible Leos Carax a bold and imaginative filmmaker who made a name for himself in the early to mid nineteen-eighties with the quirky and melancholic romantic fantasy films Boy Meets Girl (1984) and Mauvais Sang (1986), before taking his central themes of unrequited love and alienated Parisian youth to the next conceivable level with the film Les Amants Du Pont-Neuf (1991). His sensibilities are most definitely that of a stereotypical French painter. The best, most expensive student film ever made? I think Leos should have been a painter.
Undisciplined, instinctive, unhinged stuff like this needs to exist. And yet definitely beguiling, indelible, and idiosyncratic. Definitely can understand why any producer wouldn't be caught dead giving this madman a cent for the rest of his career. Definitely the most miserable, thoroughly unenjoyable and oppressive film I can remember. Definitely nihilistic, mean, cynical and ice cold. Definitely infuriating, overlong, inconsistent and borderline unwatchable. Definitely beyond excessive and self-indulgent. Definitely the most audacious literary adaptation of the past twenty years alongside BEAU TRAVAIL – also French/Melville (can we get that Lynne Ramsay MOBY DICK-in-space joint already?!). Definitely still the most batshit insane piece of cinema with god-level location scouting not named POSSESSION.
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