Pola X

An official competition entry last year at Cannes, Leon Caras's Pola X is a strident, browbeating and bafflingly opaque update of Herman Melville's obscure 1852 romance Pierre, or The Ambiguities - but yet with some felicitous touches of eroticism and intellectual gloom. Pierre (Guillaume Depardieu) is a young novelist whose pampered life in Normandy is shattered by the appearance of a mysterious and long-lost sister Isabelle (Katerina Golubeva).

  1. Pola X
  2. Production year: 1999
  3. Countries: France, Japan, Rest of the world
  4. Cert (UK): 18
  5. Runtime: 134 mins
  6. Directors: Leos Carax
  7. Cast: Christoph Schneider, Guillaume Depardieu, Till Lindemann
  8. More on this film

Her presence compels him to seek out a passionately authentic writer's existence in the stews of Paris. It is possible that the distinction between a patrician pastoral existence and the exotic degradation of the city works better in the 19th-century novel: in a modern context, it looks naive. The bizarre anarcho-commune where Pierre finally holes up with its weird dudes playing heavy prog rock is outrageously implausible and daft. Pierre's agent finger-waggingly quotes Musil at him: "One can't resent one's era without being punished by it." But Pola X seems unsure of what era it is really in.

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