"... I need new tools, understand? Raging torrents, volcanoes... The stuff for a true book. I want to see what's hidden and live my hidden life to the full. Then I'll be able to write that book... Worse than the worst disease known to man. The real truth."
Those words, spoken by Guillaume Depardieu (as protagonist and lead, Pierre), ring out like an artistic mission statement somewhere in the middle of Leos Carax's dense 1999 opus
Pola X. And if, as a viewer, what you'd been watching up to this point hadn't already made it clear, you should now be aware that this is a movie about exploration. It's about upsetting the balance. Seeking truth and meaning. It's about being an artist. It's about abandoning expectation and following a path of your own choosing. It's about creating your own destiny. It's about staring into the abyss. It's about waving your middle fingers into that big, empty fuckin abyss. It's about the desperate, sacrificial journey of the artist, and all the beauty and ugliness that accompanies such a journey. It's about all these things and more; and for at least as many reasons, it's become one of my favorite films I've ever seen.
But first, a bit of background...
For an immediate glimpse into the cryptic nature of this film's existence, look no further than the names of its title and creator.
Pola X is the fourth feature film made by the wonderfully singular French film maker Leos Carax, which is not only the professional pseudonym of a man named Alex Cristophe Dupont, but also an anagram of the names 'Alex' and 'Oscar'. Additionally, the title
Pola X is an acronym based on the film's source material, Herman Melville's
Pierre: or, The Ambiguities, or in French,
Pierre: or, Les Ambiguities, aka
P.O.L.A. The 'X' in the title refers to Carax's 10th draft of his screenplay for the film. All in all, it stands to reason this film was made by a man who puts a lot of attention into hiding information behind carefully considered facades. (And for the record, I've never read Melville's original
Pierre, but I recently bought it and intend to read it soon. Perhaps once I have, I'll chime in with an addendum to this post for further exploration.)
It also deserves note in light of what I intend to explore in writing about the film, that both of the film's leads, Guillaume Depardieu and Yekaterina Golubeva, passed away rather young in the years since the film's making. And as a kind of disclaimer, I'd like to say first and foremost that it's my intention to treat everything I write about this film with the utmost respect and sensitivity toward the lives of these two individuals, as I have a great deal of respect for both of them, as well as for anyone involved in the making of this film. I personally consider it a kind of flawed, minor masterpiece and an enormously powerful piece of work, and I have a deep admiration for any and all who participated in its creation.
While I can only speculate on the intentions of those who created the film, I think part of what makes it such a special piece of work is that it appears, to me, to be a kind of meta-exploration of the artistic process. I believe this to be so because what I see in the film, and all that is encoded in the film's narrative DNA, is thematically echoed by the lived-in work of the two people who are most prominently acting in it. In other words, if
Pola X is a story ostensibly about seeking meaning through art, and what it means to do so in an EXTREMELY committed way, I believe these two wonderful actors (Depardieu and Golubeva) gave their selves to this film with the same passion and intensity that their characters (Pierre and Isabelle, respectively) do toward what they're seeking spiritually within the story.
And what a crazy story it is.
The story begins by detailing the domestic life of Pierre. He lives on a beautiful slab of rural French property, sharing his estate with his "sister" Marie, played by Catherine Deneuve (who, in her mid-50's during the film's production, is as much a picture of sublime Gallic elegance as she's ever been). The two of them share an at times uncomfortably close relationship for supposed siblings, and this is consistent with the ambiguous nature of many of Pierre's relationship's throughout the movie.
From the outset, the film has a beautiful feel for domestic intimacy. An early scene sees Pierre giddily sneak into the bed of his girlfriend Lucie. While dressing during their mutual, morning-after bathroom ritual, she's interrupted by Pierre's hands-on affection and in a directorial touch that I absolutely love, gets caught mid-stream in an attempt to pull her top over her head, pausing for a brief moment on the beautifully surreal sight of her face's skeletal outline heaving excitedly through her shirt.
Preparations are being made for the two to be married. There's also talk of the forthcoming arrival of a presence from their past - A persistently mentioned character named Thibault, who Pierre at one point refers to as "a brother, a cousin." We get a sense these three were once in a kind of love triangle, and they fondly refer to themselves as "the three inseparables." When Pierre meets Thibault in a cafe and we see the two interact for the first time, there's no mistaking an intimacy that stretches well beyond the typical boundaries of a friendship or a familial bond.
Pierre lives a charmed life. He has a beautiful bride-to-be. He cruises the countryside on his motorbike. He has the doting care of his live-in "sister" at his disposal. It's clear these people have no shortage of money. What's more: Pierre is a hugely successful writer and has published a best-seller under an anonymous pen name. His work is visible everywhere and there's an exciting, enviable air of public mystery surrounding the identity of this man who remains an unknown on the streets.
And then everything changes.
Pierre begins hearing noises at night while out and around their property. He's having dreams about a strange, "timeless" woman, which coincide with hasty appearances from a young, dark-haired vagrant woman who seems to be following him around.
And oddly, something has come alive within him. He feels a need to seek this woman. He's ignoring his domestic obligations. He wrecks his bike attempting to chase after her through a residential neighborhood. She has his undivided attention.
Eventually he finds her on a country road and she makes chase into the forest. When he finally catches up to her, the two take a long walk through the woods that will forever alter the course of their lives.
In a roughly 10-minute long, naturally-lit and scarcely visible scene, the two walk through a forest in the dark as she tells a rambling, semi-coherent story about her childhood through a thick accent of vaguely Eastern European origin. She says her name is Isabelle and claims to be his long lost sister, born out of wedlock while their mutual father worked as a diplomat in war-torn Europe many years earlier. She tells of the horrors of her upbringing; about being funneled through a series of nasty, abusive living arrangements, and being shaken to her core by the endless barrage of bombings on the corpse-strewn streets of her youth.
Pierre is deeply affected, and he seems to know that a lot of what she says makes sense. He starts tearing down the walls of his home, perhaps thereby symbolically tearing down the lies and falsehoods of his own upbringing - Those that are tied to so many of these wrongly compartmentalized relationships in his life... And from here the film takes a dramatic left turn. Pierre will now follow Isabelle down the proverbial rabbit hole and into oblivion.
"All my life I've waited for something that would push me beyond all this," he says. He walks away from his marriage, opting for a new life with Isabelle in Paris, and leaving his past life behind.
Now, to tell too much more about the story's specifics would be to play spoilers more than I already have, or am willing to. What I will say about what remains is that the beautiful country is uniformly replaced by the suffocating city, and Pierre dives headlong into his new life, pursuing something deeply, profoundly unknowable. The two take up residence with a kind of off-the-grid, militant cult living in a warehouse in what must be one of the uglier, more industrial sections of Paris. The movie gets aggressively less accessible as it goes on, and plays out to the tune of a noise-y, discordant and extremely abrasive Scott Walker soundtrack which is being conducted in real time by the members of this pseudo-cult, from the confines of the couple's new home.
Pierre finds a worthy subject for his next piece of work in the cult's leader and spirals endlessly inward in search of meaning through his writing. Depardieu wears Pierre's struggles like a terminally depleting sickness, and only seems to find a semblance of happiness through his relationship with Isabelle.
Golubeva as Isabelle, on the other hand, is a raw nerve of restless, volatile energy... A kind of shell-shocked woman-child. This is a VERY intense woman who seems to be channeling something primitive and gravely authentic within herself; all in service of a character who seems hopelessly, perpetually fucked by the hand that life has dealt her.
The two make magic on the screen when they're together and when they're apart, and in what is surely and perhaps unfortunately the most well-publicized and documented component of the film's history, even submit to a lengthy, unsimulated sex scene in the middle of the film.
If the scene weren't consistent with the elegant, naturally-lit aesthetic sensibilities of the film at large, and you were able to clearly scrutinize what was happening on screen, you'd likely consider it one of the most explicit sex scenes ever committed to celluloid. Instead what you see is REAL; uncompromised by any kind of superficial directorial touch. It's strangely, mournfully beautiful, much like everything else you'll see in the film.
Pierre's chance encounter with Isabelle has given him a new sense of purpose, and a shot at investigating a "real truth." And with this in mind, I can't help but think this film may have offered a similar opportunity to these two brave souls who so graciously gave their selves to Carax's vision. And to take it one step further, I'd even go so far as to say I wasn't necessarily surprised to retroactively learn that these two beautiful individuals did in fact die young... And I say that with absolute respect. Because what they did in this film - and it can't be understated - was COMMITTED. I don't say this lightly. These artists were explorers in the same mold as Pierre himself. And it's my belief that the act of exploring the limits of our capacity for human expression is an experience that comes at a great, soul-baring cost: It comes with the cost of potentially finding something closer to the truth than we may have bargained for. More to the point, it requires an inherent wildness, the likes of which can only be accessed by those who live with a greater fatalistic willingness than us mere mortals.
So to me, embedded somewhere in the murky waters of
Pola X, exists a truth that gets closer to the essence of why we create than that of most pieces of art I can name. And it's for this reason that
Pola X is a movie I'll return to over and over again, like a road map leading ever closer to the reasons why we, as artists, spend our lives desperately trying to be explorers of our own kind.
And really, what more could we ask for?
