Pola X (1999) – Leos Carax.

Leo Carax's vibrant, consistently intriguing, exquisitely French drama presents an effete, greatly privileged young author Pierre (Guillaume Depardieu), who dramatically rejects his bourgeois status, absconding to the city with Isabelle (Yekaterina Golubeva)a breathlessly beautiful, desperately pale, itinerant woman who claims to be his estranged sister. Pierre's urge to escape his overtly tactile, smothering older sister (Catherine Deneuve), and plainly neurotic fiance Lucie (Delphine Chulliot) is not only relatable, I believe it is nigh on essential, otherwise he would inevitably be absorbed into the vastly indolent corpus of the ruling elite. Like all works of anguished existentialist cinema, a series of tragedies fatefully befall the two isolated, increasingly intimate protagonists. The performances are really rather lovely, and Carax's visually compelling narrative proves cinematic, rather than literary, which is so often usually the case with French cinema.

The increasingly frantic final act, is, for me, absolutely compelling, the arrival of the fragile, waif-like Lucie certainly provides for a classically tragic ménage a trois. While I can see why many would find tousle-haired, neo-beatnik Pierre a spoiled, dilettantish character, perhaps, even a little vapid, I believe his drive to write something truly exemplary is quite genuine. His vagabond existence in this reclaimed industrial squat is not only sustaining, but may provide the galvanizing inspiration he previously lacked. Cinema, at its very best, should provide ambiguities, make space for ambivalence, thereby allowing the viewer to inform his, or her own views on the protagonists inner motivations, good, bad, or ugly! Tragic, sensual, hysteric, visually sumptuous, and surprisingly humane, Leos Carax's divinely immersive drama was a film I was more than happy to experience again!