Whilst doing my usual hunt around my local Charity shops I came across the DVD of this title, and, whilst knowing absolutely nothing about it, I purchased it for the grand total of £1 - my purchase based almost entirely on the fact that the score was by Scott Walker, a musician and performer who I credit as being a true giant of modern music. I had no remembrance of it when it was first released back in 1999, nor did I have any knowledge of its source material, the novel by Herman Melville (like 90% of people Melville equals "Moby Dick" and that is about it!), so my expectations were zero as far as the film was concerned.I left it on my shelf for some time, until I finally decided to give it a view last night. What I found was a film that held a strange hold over me during its running time of just over two hours. On the surface the film tells of a young, rich, bourgeois Frenchman named Pierre (played with increasing desperation by Guillaume Depardieu), whose life begins to unravel when he discovers that he has a secret, illegitimate sister called Isabelle (Yekaterina Golubeva - although on the DVD packing she is credited as Katerina Golubeva), a child that his mother - the wonderful Catherine Denueuve - had apparently abandoned many years before. This causes him to leave his beautiful fiancé, Lucie (Delphine Chuillot) behind to seek out the truth of his sister, and his own meaning in a world that seems to want to ignore the truth of - well, just about anything really.This journey, undertaken with his new sister, a young girl and another female companion, takes the unlikely trio into the heart of Paris - firstly in a happy, carefree existence, then, as their situation worsens - not helped by Pierre's instance that truth is the only thing that matters - beyond money, beyond fame (he had, in his previous life, written a cult best seller, and was on the verge of writing a new novel) beyond anything that stops "truth" being known. Eventually, following a tragedy involving the young girl, they end up in a commune full of artists, revolutionaries, musicians (a band that seems to be endlessly practising a full-on industrial assault on the ears of the listeners!). Eventually, after rejection and/or death of everyone around him, Pierre ends up killing his cousin, and Isabelle kills herself in front of a police van - whilst poor Lucie appears to be left to contemplate life alone.So, what is the film actually about? To me, the biggest clue comes when the trio are walking along the Left Bank in Paris and discover a book about his father - who, we had been told, had been an important diplomat who had fallen from grace for some unnamed reason. Next to the book is are works on Bosnia and the war in that country (the very first images in the film are of bombs destroying graves in some unnamed war). Is the film a parable about how the West for years ignored the truth of what was happening in that godforsaken country? Early on, when we first hear Isabelle's story, she tells of being left alone, not allowed to speak, to grown up alone in a strange place with strange people, and it was only after escaping a country full of corpses that she finds her voice. The film is also, I would say, about the thin line we all walk between leading a happy, if maybe somewhat dull life, to descending into our own morass and pity.After viewing the film I read some of the other reviews from viewers and critics, especially from those who hated it. I can appreciate just why this should be - it is not an easy watch (the scene of incest is really hard to watch - one of the hardest sex scenes I have watched in a mainstream film), and there are plenty of unexplained loopholes in the narrative (what happened to the body of the little girl?, what relationship was the girl and the other woman to Isabelle?, did any of the commune members have anything to do with the underground disaster that we hear about on the radio?) But for myself it is these unanswered questions that caused the film to hold me in its grip from start to finish.Whilst by no means Leos Carax's masterpiece this is still a film worthy of attention from anyone who is looking for something that questions their own view of the world, of truth and beauty etc.Oh yes - the reason why I brought the DVD in the first place, the score from Scott Walker! Without a doubt this is amongst his most challenging of music, but it suits the mood of the film just wonderfully!

This dark, moody French psychological drama/mystery has always been a favorite of mine. The narrative, based on a novel by Melville, follows an unusual but absorbing course. A young, upper class writer (well played by Depardieu) finds himself being stalked by a mysterious young woman, who eventually reveals some family secrets to him, sending him on a weird, downward spiral. Thrown into the mix are his suffering fiancée, an increasingly resentful cousin, a band of avant guard (I am misspelling this because IMDb's spelling check is not accepting the correct spelling) artists and revolutionaries, and beautiful Catherine Deneuve. Carax is a master at weaving together fascinating images, sounds (music by Scott Walker), and performances into an edgy, unique mix. Imho we need more films like this one.

i was looking forward to see this film but unfortunately i got disappointed very much coz simply i didn't enjoy it and sometimes when i was in the middle of the movie i just didn't know what is going on and there is a lot of questions left without any answers , for example , y Pierre's cousin starts to hate him suddenly while in the beginning of the movie they were fine and talking to each other ? another question .. how did Isabella find him ? and y they fell in love to each other in the first place " coz simply don't know each other " ? and y he left all things for her while he could stay in the big house he owned ?sorry but i was bored and kept looking to the timer to see when the hell this gonna end, so the conclusion is this is boring and not enjoyable one.

No one would ever question that director Leos Carax is a genius, but what we wonder about is: is he an insane genius? So many people hated this film! I am normally the first person to accuse many French directors of making offensive, boring, disgusting and pretentious films (such as the horrible recent film 'L'Enfant' and the pointless and offensive 'Feux Rouges'). But strangely enough, I actually think that 'Pola X' is an amazing film, made with great skill and passion by a master of his craft, and containing remarkable performances. The film does carry melodrama to more extreme lengths than I believe I have ever seen on screen before. But then, Carax is extreme, that we know. The film also contains what I consider way over-the-top Trotskyite or Anarchist fantasies and wet-dreams, what with a mysterious group of young men training to fire machine guns at the bourgeoisie in between playing Scott Walker's rather fascinating music in a band which has its recording sessions in an abandoned warehouse filled with squatters and fires burning in old steel barrels. Guillaume Depardieu plays a rich young man in a château (whose step-mother is Catherine Deneuve, and he wanders into her bathroom while she is naked in the bath, by the way). But he suddenly 'snaps' completely when he discovers that his deceased father, a famous diplomat, had fathered an illegitimate daughter who had been effectively disposed of by Deneuve as an inconvenience. This is because the sister suddenly turns up as a kind of Romanian refugee with wild dishevelled hair, expressionless face, and little ability to speak French coherently. Depardieu then transforms himself into a 'class hero' of the far left and wants to kill or destroy his family for their hypocrisy and corruption, and lives in squalor and extreme poverty, while scorning a vast inheritance. He then commences an incestuous sexual relationship with his half-sister, which is shown in an explicit sex scene which has offended many people, though I have no objection to it, as I think people are far too hysterical about sex, especially in America, where apparently it never happens. The intensity of the acting and the filming make this unlikely scenario come off as an experience of powerful, if depressing, hyper-melodrama. The differences between Carax making an extreme film like this and the numerous extreme French films which I think are pretentious and disgusting are (1) that Carax is an excellent filmmaker, and (2) he is seriously attempting to explore a meaningful, if harrowing, extreme emotional condition, whereby a human being disintegrates and turns against his background. Many would say that the extreme elements in this film were gratuitous, but I don't agree. I believe Carax was genuine, and was not making an exploitation picture at all. It is very difficult to defend a man who goes that far and who, for all I know, may be a complete madman, but I believe he deserves defending for this remarkable cinematic achievement.