Pola X (Carax, 1999): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 8.25pm
This 35mm presentation, also being screened on May 28th (details here), is part of the French Extremity season at BFI Southbank. The full film schedule can be found via this link.
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 (and above) is the trailer.
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