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Pola X Actors: Guillaume Depardieu, Yekaterina Golubeva, Catherine Deneuve Director: Leos Carax Number of Items: 1 Picture Format: Anamorphic Widescreen Format: Color, Widescreen, Dolby Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated) Running Time: 134 minutes Studio: Fox Lorber Region Code: 1 Product Group: DVD Release Date: 2001-04-10 Buy from Amazon |
 "Wow!"That's the first thing that popped into my head after I saw this riveting French film: "Wow!" Everything about this film is of the first rank: acting, directing, writing. I think some viewers had problems with Pierre abruptly leaving his family and friends without an explanation for his mysterious behavior. Why didn't he ask his mother for the truth about his half sister--if she was in fact his half sister? I don't think it mattered to him if she was his half sister or not--I think he saw her as his ticket out of his comfortable and dull life. What I liked about the film was how it played with the concept of reality and fantasy. What may be real to a writer may be fantasy to a reader. Hence, that's probably the reason why no one believed that Pierre actually wrote his first bestselling novel. This film takes chances and will stimulate or offend some people--but isn't that what great films usually do? "A Blast of Cinematic Energy You Won't Soon Forget"Pola X is a love it or hate it experience. Motorcycles on winding roads it may have, but these roads are not called "Middle." This film, brought to us by the same man who brought us the intense, passionate, uncomfortable film The Lovers on the Bridge in 1991, revisits some of the same territory of that film here. There is Desperation. Lust. Love. Blindness. Sight. Darkness. Light. Prosperity. Intense Poverty. Artists. Their Art. The Loss of that Art. The Incredible Need to Recapture It. Hunger. Satisfaction. Illness. Life. Death. Pain. Loss. Intense joy. Bitterness. Jealousy. Regret. All in all, the ingredients of what makes a Great, with a capital G Great, film. Pola X has a light side and an incredibly dark and desolate one. The film starkly separates these sunny and shadowy pieces of our hero's life into two main segments. First we see the light. When the film opens, we meet Guillaume Depardieu, in his beautiful villa, with his beautiful mother, and his beautiful fiance. Next to all this is a beautiful little computer, next to which lies his beautiful little book, which he wrote when even younger, and which he became instantly famous for writing, a sort of cult figure. He is a beautiful young man who has everything. Except his writing, except his muse. Because he has reached a point in his life where everything is so stable and 'flat' that he is beginning to have trouble writing, creating, producing. And this is nagging at him, slightly, like a small child tugging softly at his arm for a piece of candy or a pat on the head. For a while, though, he is happy. Happy smoking a cigarette with his beautiful mother on the lovely sun-dappled lawn, and making love to his fiance with quiet passion in her young room in her own house. Happy with these creatures of light, these creatures which cannot see into him, into his dark self, his true self, his strong, artistic, belligerent self which is knocking at his door, waiting to be let out. All of this changes when he begins having dreams of a mysterious stranger, who is somehow familiar to him. Then, when in town one day with a friend, he sees a woman, a woman who somehow resembles the woman in his dream. She is following him. He follows her. They find each other. What happens next begins a gigantic odyssey of obsession, artistic fervor, dark secrets and their telling, and a manic intensity which takes our young hero, and all those around him and unravels them, slowly, one thread at a time.... This is riveting, fascinating French cinema. It asks, among other questions, which is more important: Art, or Life? Without a middle ground to choose from, our hero embarks on a desparate, driven attempt to find his Voice. As he peels off all the layers of familiarity and comfort, all health and future plans, in the name of writing again, he starts a slow, solid spin out of control, and ends up almost at the point of death. A must-have for every serious (intense) cinema lover. A raw, exorcising cinematic experience. Five Stars.  "A Good Movie"Mysterious, erotic, gripping, and artistic.  "A Disappointing Mess"Never have I seen such a dull jumbled mess of a movie. And I thought Carax's earlier "Lovers on the Bridge" was AMAZING! The story doesn't make sense and neither do the characters' motivations. Don't waste your time with this film. "a porno for pedants"This is a gorgeous dvd to look at (at least for the first hour or so) in a stunning 1:85 to 1 transfer. The sound is crisp and the subtitles are in sharp yellow, no strain to the eyes. The photography, the French locales and the cast are stunning too. The story - and I'm venturing a guess here - probably has something to do with an artist finding himself or, if you're less loftily inclined, it may be about a spoiled brat going bananas while trying out a different lifestyle to go with his new artistic goattee & grunge attire. Whatever. Lured by the names Deneuve & Depardieu, Jr., plus some outrageously complimentary reviews from several critics & the word erotic stamped all over the keepcase bracketed in their quotes, I bought it. Well, the critics & the white wine set have been lavishing this with such heavy praise & even heavier breath 'cause right in the middle there's a startlingly explicit sexual encounter of a très soixante-neuf nature between its leading man and his supposedly long lost sister. As directed & acted, it is indeed erotic, but to get there you have to sit through an inordinate amount of pseudo intellectual euro drivel. Pretentious & dour as only a European film can get, this is nothing more than a star-worship vehicle showcasing its male protagonist in various stages of distress & undress, & following in the tradition of Cocteau & Marais, Vadim & Bardot, or, if you prefer grime (of which there's plenty here) of Morrissey & Dallesandro. As further directorial emphasis, the rest of the cast (consisting mainly of the character's relatives) can't seem to keep their hands off of the hero's shirtless chest - and who can blame them? Well, Brad Pitt never had it so good, and never shall - in Hollywood. The film's obsession with incest, its timid flirtations with homoeroticism & its fascination with motorcycles as symbols of macho sexual power will remind you of Cocteau. The rest will remind you of Antonioni: sheer agony to endure. If you collect erotica and have the dough to spend on 2 minutes of good action, Columbia Tri Star has seen to it that you're not disappointed: they have craftily placed a chapter right at the beginning of this eye-popping sequence so you can skip "the boring parts" (or 99% of the film), and get to it right away. (With this scene missing, this bag of imported hot air would have never seen the light of day.) But if you're looking for 2 hours plus of solid plot & interesting characters, well, you're otta luck, pal. |
