Pola X (Carax, 1999): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 6.10pm
This film is also screening at BFI Southbank on June 3. Details here. The screening on Tuesday 5 June is part of the Passport to Cinema season and will be introduced by Philip Kemp.
There is a lot of anticipation surrounding Leos Carax's new film, Holy Motors, following its screening at Cannes last week. Here is your chance to see his previous film in a rare screening as part of the excellent Passport to Cinema season.
Chicago Reader review:
'I haven't read Herman Melville's Pierre, or the Ambiguities, but
it's reportedly director Leos Carax's favorite novel. What there is of a
plot to this 1999 modern-dress adaptation, which Carax wrote with
Lauren Sedofsky and Jean-Pol Fargeau, concerns a wealthy author
(Guillaume Depardieu, son of Gerard) living in Normandy in
semi-incestuous contentment with his mother (Catherine Deneuve). Upon
encountering a soulful eastern European war refugee (Katerina Golubeva)
who claims to be his half sister, he runs out on his wealthy fiancee
(Delphine Chuillot) and retreats to a funky part of Paris to write
another novel. There's clearly some sort of self-portraiture going on
here. A 19th-century romantic inhabiting a universe as mythological as
Jean Cocteau's, Carax (Boy Meets Girl, Bad Blood, The Lovers on the Bridge)
has a wonderful cinematic eye and a personal feeling for editing
rhythms, and his sense of overripeness and excess virtually defines him.
He's as self-indulgent as they come, and we'd all be much the poorer if
he weren't. Characteristic of his private sense of poetics is this
film's dedication, near the end of the closing credits, “to my three
sisters”—it appears on-screen for less than a second. Pola, incidentally, is the acronym of the French title of Melville's novel; X alludes to the fact that Carax used the tenth draft of the script.' Jonathan Rosenbaum
Here is a trailer.
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