Close Up

12 - 25 May 2019: Pola X

pola-x-leos-carax.jpg

Pola X
Leos Carax, 1999, 134 min, 35mm
French with English subtitles

"Ex-enfant terrible Leos Carax takes the ingredients of melodrama – family secrets, persecuted innocents, forbidden love, betrayal – and scrambles them into an audacious postmodern opera of artistic angst. Pierre (Guillaume Depardieu) is a leisure-class, “voice of his generation” writer who gets sucked into a through-the-looking-glass rabbit hole of underclass grime and incest when he encounters an Eastern European war refugee (Yekaterina Golubeva) claiming to be his long-lost sister. Like the novel that inspired it – Herman Melville’s controversial Pierre; or, The Ambiguities – this enigmatic, unrestrained film maudit was met with divisive skepticism upon its release, but today looks more and more like an essential work of blazingly personal vision." – Film Society of Lincoln Center


Part of our tribute to Scott Walker