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POLA X (Leos
Carax) 2000 Watching
Leos Carax’s POLA X is like watching a strobe light for two hours. You see
flashes of brilliance, and lots of them, but eventually you start to realize
that a lot of the time you’re left in the dark. The film is a modernization of
a Herman Melville novel from 1852 (Pierre of the Ambiguities - an acronym of the
book’s French title provides the movie’s name, with the X supposedly
referring to the fact that the tenth draft of the screenplay was filmed) and
some of the updating in it is creaky at best. The way that the homeless are
treated here is particularly notable for its credulity straining and it’s
especially surprising coming from Carax, who made the excellent The
Lovers on the Bridge, which portrayed the plight of the homeless quite
intelligently. Also irksome is the inevitable third act, which shows the hero as
he falls from grace, since it doesn’t feel very plausible that he would fall
so hard so fast. Maybe this played better in the novel, where Melville would be
able to justify why the character doesn’t swallow a bit of pride and do the
obvious, but in the filmed version it makes you wish that Carax had created POLA XI and fixed it. The
film is much more successful when you don’t pick apart its plot. It’s filled
with emotions writ large, but the solid performances of the cast keeps things
from feeling overly melodramatic. The visual splendor and contrasting squalor
that Carax casts the movie in manages to magnify the already oversized drama.
The estate at the film’s start is so luxurious and is populated by people so
gorgeous that you start counting toward the downfall from the get-go (though the
opening coda in which a graveyard blows apart probably plants a few seeds too).
Carax isn’t a subtle director, but that’s okay too. He melds the romanticism
found in the novel with a feeling of generational nihilism that seems to be
kicking anything in the film that resembles the establishment. Each set piece
that Carax throws at us seems another swipe at something, but it’s slightly
ambiguous what it is, exactly. Surely, the sins of the father weigh heavily upon
our protagonist, but there’s more to it than that. The feeling of restlessness
seems to be the dominant one. Things don’t exactly make sense as the film
progresses, but emotions do. We can sympathize with the protagonist’s plight
and Carax’s directorial parlor tricks fill in many of the remaining gaps, in
their own exaggerated way. ***1/2 01/15/02 Jeremy Heilman
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