by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night I ran Charles and I our “feature” movie for the evening, Pola X, a 1999 French film (fortunately it was already set
up with the English subtitles turned on so I didn’t have to go back to the main
menu and hunt for them) more or less based on an 1852 novel by Herman Melville
called Pierre: Or, The Ambiguities.
Melville’s Pierre was the
immediate follow-up to Moby Dick
and completed the destruction of Melville’s commercial career Moby
Dick had begun; before Moby Dick Melville’s reputation was as a writer of South
Seas-set potboiler romances like Typee, but the book that is now considered Melville’s masterpiece was a
disaster in the marketplace and, though Melville was able to continue
publishing until virtually the end of his life, he never again enjoyed the
sales figures he’d been used to in his first decade as a novelist. So Melville
made his next book a fictionalized autobiography about the travails of a
writer, Pierre Glendinning, whose well-to-do father had just died, forcing him
to return to the family’s ancestral estate while the will is sorted out. Pierre
is engaged to a woman named Lucy Tartan, but this marriage is less his own idea
than that of his domineering mother, since Lucy is also from a well-to-do
family and mom wants to secure Pierre’s future by uniting the two fortunes. But
Pierre’s affections are sidetracked by a mystery woman named Isabel Banford,
who may or may not be his half-sister, and Pierre starts an affair with her
while Lucy ends up with his cousin, Glendinning Stanley — only at the end of
the book Pierre shoots his cousin and both he and Lucy then commit suicide, in
an ending that seems more like the finale of a Verdi opera than a mid-19th
century American novel.
I was interested in watching Pola X — indeed, his involvement was why I had bought the
DVD in the first place — because the soundtrack music was composed by Scott
Walker, the eccentric American boy-band star from the 1960’s who, reversing the
trajectory of the “British Invasion” bands, emigrated to England and spent the
rest of his life there. His first solo album was aimed squarely at the cabaret
market and featured big orchestral arrangements by Wally Stott (who later
underwent gender reassignment and became Angela Morley), indicating that had
Walker wanted to he could have become his generation’s Frank Sinatra. Only he
didn’t want to: during the early 1970’s his music became more experimental and
his lyrics more political, and he later largely abandoned conventional song
forms and started doing far-out combinations of classical and rock. Walker was
a major influence on a number of British rock musicians, notably David Bowie;
though Bowie only covered one Walker song, “Night Flight,” he performed live
two of the three Jacques Brel songs, “My Death” and “Amsterdam,” Walker had
recorded on his first solo album.
Filming Pola X was the brainchild of director Leos Carax, who
co-wrote the script with Jean-Pol Fargeau and Lauren Sedofsky and directed the
film solo (he had enough of a reputation in France he got the possessory
credit, “A Leos Carax Film”), and he transplanted the story from 1850’s New
York to 1990’s France. Carax cast Guillaume Depardieu, son of French superstar
Gérard Depardieu (who was in so many French films, especially at his peak in
the 1980’s, I used to joke that the French legislature had passed a law
stipulating that Gérard Depardieu must be in every film made there), as Pierre (and in a macabre case
of life imitating art, Depardieu fils had a motorcycle accident — we see a lot of him riding a motorcycle in
the film — and during his hospital treatment contracted an antibiotic-resistant
infection that gave him two years of ill health, forced the amputation of his
leg, and finally killed him in 2008 at age 37). He also put Catherine Deneuve,
older than we remember her from her 1960’s films but still in great shape
physically and acting with magisterial authority, in the part of Pierre’s
mother Marie. Pierre in this version is the son of a well-to-do diplomat — the
family has an estate in the south of France — who has just died; he had a
reputation as a humanitarian who saved a lot of people’s lives in the 1970’s
but a tell-all book that trashes him is about to come out, though Pierre has no
idea about that until close to the end of the film. Pierre, his best friend
Thibault (Laurent Lucas) and his cousin/girlfriend Lucie (Delphine Chuillot)
were a tight-knit trio as they grew up, but their bonds have been considerably
weakened because Lucie is going to marry Pierre.
On a couple of night trips on
his motorcycle — which Pierre inherited from his late father and which his mom
insists he treat like a relic (every time he crashes it and some damage is done
we worry mom is going to have a royal freak-out over it) — Pierre spots a
mysterious woman with long dark hair (she reminded me of how Yoko Ono looked on
the cover of her 1972 album Approximately Infinite Universe, one of the great unsung masterpieces of women’s
rock — no kidding!) who when he runs into her and she spots him always seems to
be carrying grocery bags which she drops running away from him. When he finally
catches up to her, she turns out to be Isabelle (Yekaterina Golubeva), who on
the film’s imdb.com page is listed as Pierre’s half-sister but whose
relationship to him, such as it is, is carefully unspecified and kept ambiguous
in the actual film. (In fact, a lot
of things are carefully unspecified and kept ambiguous in the actual film. This
is the sort of movie in which the director and writers are deliberately keeping
you in the dark for much of the running time as to who is who and how they
relate to each other.) Isabelle looks so spectral in her initial appearances
both Charles and I at first thought she was a ghost. Pierre has written a
sensationally successful novel called To the Light that has been hailed as the voice of France’s
late-1990’s youth, but he published it under a pseudonym and the enigma around
who he is has become a major selling point of the book. While he’s staying at
his mom’s estate we see him using a computer to write his second novel, but
what we see of the prose indicates it’s awful and clichéd. (We get it: he’s blocked.)
When Pierre meets
Isabelle he starts a sexual affair with her, which launches him on a downward
spiral that takes up most of the film’s plot. He bails on Lucie, leaves his
mom’s estate, moves to Paris and ends up staying in a converted warehouse whose
ground floor is the rehearsal studio for an avant-garde music ensemble, heavy
on oil drums and other improvised percussive devices. He moves in with Isabelle
and the two enact one of the oddest sex scenes in movie history, which Carax
shoots mostly in close-ups of body parts so it’s not all that clear who’s doing
what to whom — it seems that before they actually fuck they do a 69 on each
other and Pierre brings Isabelle to orgasm through cunnilingus — and when Lucie
finally traces them to Paris she gets her own room in the converted warehouse
and the two women, being French, apparently avoid the jealousy and bitterness
one might expect from an American film about a jilted fiancée confronting her
ex and his new fuck buddy. At one point, in a scene apparently copied from
Melville’s book, Pierre visits his old friend Thibault to take him up on his
offer of hospitality, only Thibault is hosting a risqué party and angrily
denounces Pierre, saying he doesn’t know him and he’s only an impostor pretending to be his old friend. Pierre is also trying to
continue as a writer, but in his straitened circumstances he can only write in
longhand, and for some symbolic reason he’s using red ink — which ties in to a
later dream Pierre has in which he and Isabelle are literally drowning in a
river of blood. As the thing rolls on one wonders how on earth Carax and his
collaborators are going to end it — they have Pierre kill Thibault but then,
instead of committing suicide, he’s merely arrested and the final shot of him
is in the police van being taken to prison.
Pola X is the sort of movie Charles and I used to watch a
lot more often than we do now — back when Ralph DeLauro was still running the
Monday night film screenings at the San Diego Public Library (though, as
Charles pointed out, even he probably wouldn’t have run a film with so explicit
a sex scene) and we were also going to the Media Arts Center showings in their
old home in Golden Hill (oddly we’ve been there a lot less often even though
their current home in North Park is walking distance from ours!) — not only is
it a foreign film (though it’s not very dialogue-driven and it’s easy enough to
absorb the subtitles; it’s the overall plotting and situations that make it
obscure) but it’s done very “artistically,” with an extraordinary visual flair
and a rather airy attitude towards plot construction. One thing I noticed
during the movie is that Pierre’s appearance, especially his face, changes
quite radically during the film: in some scenes he’s relatively kempt, wearing
clean clothes, his hair combed and his cheeks clean-shaven; in other scenes his
hair is tousled and he has scraggle on his face that by the end of the movie
has become a pretty obvious moustache and beard. In another sort of film you
might read these facial changes as indicating flashbacks, but one tool of
avant-garde cinema Carax and his co-writers don’t seem to be using here is time displacement. Just
before Pierre — or the Pierre we’ve seen through most of the movie, the one who
went into a heavy-duty downward spiral once he met Isabelle — shoots Thibault, another Pierre, or at least someone who looks like him,
walks up to Thibault on the street and greets him — making me wonder if we were
supposed to believe the disheveled Pierre really was an impostor, which would explain the switchbacks in
his facial appearance and the apparent drop in his talents as a writer (he
submits three chapters of his new book to a publisher and gets back a rejection
that says it’s “formless” and “reeks of plagiarism”), but then again if the
Pierre we’ve seen through most of the movie is an impostor, surely his mom and
Lucie would have caught on.
I was struck by the irony that for the second
Saturday in a row I was watching a movie that was a modern-day transformation
of a 19th century novel — last week’s was Pride and
Prejudice Atlanta, writer Tracy McMillan’s
and director Rhonda Baraka’s artful transposition of Jane Austen’s Pride
and Prejudice into a story about modern-day
Black 1 percenters in Atlanta for the Lifetime channel — and while watching Pride
and Prejudice Atlanta made me want to read Pride
and Prejudice (which I’m doing now) to see
what McMillan and Baraka were working from and how they altered Austen’s story
to fit it into modern times, Pola X
has made me want to read Melville’s Pierre in hopes it would explain
the film to me!
