Pola X

It takes a raving lunatic to know one. Not that I have ever met Leos Carax, the director of "Pola X," so that I can say for sure he's as tempestuous and impulsive as the subject of his film, but you aren't described as an enfant terrible at the age of 39 without good reason. Certainly Pierre, his hero, is an inspired visionary, a youth inflamed by romantic fantasies, who sees himself as a great artist and is in love with reckless gestures.

The film is a reasonably close adaptation of Herman Melville's 1852 novel Pierre. Carax's title is an acronym of the French title, Pierre, ou les Ambiguities, and the X refers to the 10th draft of the screenplay. Pierre was written following Melville's Moby Dick, and after the classical architecture of its prose, the next novel came as a shock with its lurid fevers.

Melville wrote at white-hot speed, he said, as if in a dream, and for many years it was unavailable in an uncensored version (an unexpurgated edition was published in the 1990s). Dealing as it does with Pierre's incestuous obsessions with a mother and a half-sister, it was not what admirers of the great white whale were expecting.

Carax sets his story in present-day France, although with the exception of a few cars, motorcycles, props and street scenes, its period could be the 19th century. He tells the story of Pierre (Guillaume Depardieu), a spoiled young aristocrat who has written a trendy best-selling novel and lives in a chateau with his mother Marie (Catherine Deneuve).

They are alarmingly close; they call each other "my brother" and "my sister," he lights two cigarettes and gives her one, he visits her nude in her bath and so on. Deneuve is able to make scenes like these work because she can float above the carnal, in a realm where sex is a whim rather than a function.

Pierre is engaged to his cousin Lucie (Delphine Chuillot), who lives in a neighboring chalet and is an ethereal blonde waif; his mother could no more be jealous of Lucie than if Pierre adopted a cute spaniel. Also on the scene, having recently returned from his labors on the Chicago Stock Exchange, is a dark-browed cousin, Thibault (Laurent Lucas), who in his satanic way resents that Pierre will take Lucie out of his grasp, and also perhaps that Lucie will take Pierre out of his grasp. He refers to them as "the three inseparables," but the other two lean toward separability.

There is a mystery woman (Katerina Golubeva), deep-eyed, long-haired, ragged and wolf-like, who shadows Pierre. The sight of her fills him with deep churnings and obscure dreams. One night as he is roaring through the woods on his motorcycle, he surprises her lurking in the gloom, pursues her and hears her story: "Believe me, Pierre, you are not an only child. I am your sister, Isabelle." In a long, long monologue (it is a stand-alone section in the novel), she tells her story. She is the love child of Pierre's father, was raised in the woods by an old man and woman, speaks simply in a high-pitched voice, is unsocialized and desperate.