Pola X (Leos Carax, 1999)

 

Leos Carax’ darkly haunting Pola X might most straightforwardly be seen as a tale of madness and self-obliteration: under the influence of a strange, homeless woman who claims to be his sister, a successful young author abandons his fiancée and elegant surroundings to live in increasing poverty and disrepair, the downward trajectory of his life so darkly compelling that it eventually draws in the fiancée and spreads through what’s left of his family. But at the same time, it may be one of cinema’s most unnerving tales of liberation; those opening scenes are mocking in their opulence, hinting at incipient instability in the way that he seems to have a more complex sexual tension with his sister (Catherine Deneuve) than with his fiancée, the facts of his success coming under a pseudonym and of his inability to make progress on a second novel all pointing to underlying fracture. The sense of looming tragedy is immeasurably boosted by the subsequent personal history of its two leads – the trajectory of Guillaume Depardieu’s Pierre from cutting-edge handsome to an imposing wreck seems to foresee the actor’s pending misfortunes, and Katerina Golubeva’s Isabelle is one of the gravest presences in modern cinema; the scenes of the two walking together in their outdated, oversized clothes evoke a visitation from below, an impression that resonates against the repurposed factory in which they find a home, occupied by a vaguely cult-like alternative community of music-makers and techies and who knows what, as if in some workshop of the soul, gradually eroding any possibility of returning to conventional society. But the film is also extraordinarily physical and immediate, not least in its then-notorious sex scene, at once heart-stoppingly intimate and rather offputting in its directness, further establishing the extreme tangibility and transgressiveness of what we and the protagonists are experiencing.