The greatest movie ever made..!

I am only giving this movie a 1 for the great cast, though I can't imagine what any of them were thinking. This movie was horrible

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

Whilst doing my usual hunt around my local Charity shops I came across the DVD of this title, and, whilst knowing absolutely nothing about it, I purchased it for the grand total of £1 - my purchase based almost entirely on the fact that the score was by Scott Walker, a musician and performer who I credit as being a true giant of modern music. I had no remembrance of it when it was first released back in 1999, nor did I have any knowledge of its source material, the novel by Herman Melville (like 90% of people Melville equals "Moby Dick" and that is about it!), so my expectations were zero as far as the film was concerned.I left it on my shelf for some time, until I finally decided to give it a view last night. What I found was a film that held a strange hold over me during its running time of just over two hours. On the surface the film tells of a young, rich, bourgeois Frenchman named Pierre (played with increasing desperation by Guillaume Depardieu), whose life begins to unravel when he discovers that he has a secret, illegitimate sister called Isabelle (Yekaterina Golubeva - although on the DVD packing she is credited as Katerina Golubeva), a child that his mother - the wonderful Catherine Denueuve - had apparently abandoned many years before. This causes him to leave his beautiful fiancé, Lucie (Delphine Chuillot) behind to seek out the truth of his sister, and his own meaning in a world that seems to want to ignore the truth of - well, just about anything really.This journey, undertaken with his new sister, a young girl and another female companion, takes the unlikely trio into the heart of Paris - firstly in a happy, carefree existence, then, as their situation worsens - not helped by Pierre's instance that truth is the only thing that matters - beyond money, beyond fame (he had, in his previous life, written a cult best seller, and was on the verge of writing a new novel) beyond anything that stops "truth" being known. Eventually, following a tragedy involving the young girl, they end up in a commune full of artists, revolutionaries, musicians (a band that seems to be endlessly practising a full-on industrial assault on the ears of the listeners!). Eventually, after rejection and/or death of everyone around him, Pierre ends up killing his cousin, and Isabelle kills herself in front of a police van - whilst poor Lucie appears to be left to contemplate life alone.So, what is the film actually about? To me, the biggest clue comes when the trio are walking along the Left Bank in Paris and discover a book about his father - who, we had been told, had been an important diplomat who had fallen from grace for some unnamed reason. Next to the book is are works on Bosnia and the war in that country (the very first images in the film are of bombs destroying graves in some unnamed war). Is the film a parable about how the West for years ignored the truth of what was happening in that godforsaken country? Early on, when we first hear Isabelle's story, she tells of being left alone, not allowed to speak, to grown up alone in a strange place with strange people, and it was only after escaping a country full of corpses that she finds her voice. The film is also, I would say, about the thin line we all walk between leading a happy, if maybe somewhat dull life, to descending into our own morass and pity.After viewing the film I read some of the other reviews from viewers and critics, especially from those who hated it. I can appreciate just why this should be - it is not an easy watch (the scene of incest is really hard to watch - one of the hardest sex scenes I have watched in a mainstream film), and there are plenty of unexplained loopholes in the narrative (what happened to the body of the little girl?, what relationship was the girl and the other woman to Isabelle?, did any of the commune members have anything to do with the underground disaster that we hear about on the radio?) But for myself it is these unanswered questions that caused the film to hold me in its grip from start to finish.Whilst by no means Leos Carax's masterpiece this is still a film worthy of attention from anyone who is looking for something that questions their own view of the world, of truth and beauty etc.Oh yes - the reason why I brought the DVD in the first place, the score from Scott Walker! Without a doubt this is amongst his most challenging of music, but it suits the mood of the film just wonderfully!

I kept thinking watching Pola X, the first Leos Carax film I've seen yet, what it means for a film or any work of art to be "pretentious". The dictionary defines it as being or seeming to be "expressive of affected, unwarranted, or exaggerated importance, worth, or stature". Carax does indeed want his film to be important, and sometimes he does go to exaggerated lengths to get his results, of the 'artsy-fartsy' kind that one would only find in small art-houses in NYC (in fact, this was probably a film that screened for at least a month at the Angelika in Manhattan). But there's an intriguing conceit that Carax has with his material as it goes along: it's almost as if he's critiquing pretension, mocking it in subtle ways as he shows his disparate and desperate character heading towards an uber tragic end. It's a story that unfolds too thickly in hopelessness, where the characters don't seem to mind it as there is hope for two of them, at one point, that things will get better until they start getting horribly worse, sometimes in the abstract. Try as I might have at the half-way point to dismiss it as rambling pseudo-poetic French dreck, there's an appeal and watchable quality to it all, and I'd almost be inclined to call it a good effort...Almost.The story is taken from a Herman Melville novel, though I'd wonder how much exactly was changed in the adaptation (incest, anyone?) Pierre (Depardieu, son of Gerard) is a novelist engaged to beautiful Lucie, and lives with his mother (Deneauve), but is torn away after finding one night in the woods that he has a long lost older sister who was raised elsewhere in Europe. He moves with her to Paris, and after getting rejected by a cousin (Lucas, disappearing for a long while in the film then returning in act three, or five, or whatever), go to live in a big warehouse type of loft where a weird avant-garde rock band practices and records songs. Meanwhile, a new crazy book is in the works, a child that was tagging along with another woman (I'd assume Isabelle's friend or caregiver or something) is killed randomly, and pretty quickly Pierre goes as insane and rambling as his book. Now, granted, a lot of this is presented matter-of-factly, but there is a mood that Carax creates that makes it "affected". There's a tint, for example, that sometimes makes characters look all blue- which works more or less in the revelation of who Isabelle is to Pierre in the woods- and scenes that aren't totally clear as to whether they are really real or imagined (Deneuve's fate on a bike is shot and executed almost as a parody of itself). And Depardieu himself is like a walking pit of uncertain angst. He plays him adequately enough, but there is the creeping sense, as with the film a lot of times, that there isn't quite as much dimension as one would hope, or at least would think the filmmaker would recognize.Not that this is a total deterrent. I like when a filmmaker isn't afraid to plunge the viewer into unconventional duress and ambiguity, and for at least a few scenes Pola X does feel thriving with a sense of drama infused well by the exquisite but anxious camera-work (the child's death is one of these, as well as the climax that gains momentum in a style comparable to Strosek, minus the chicken). And the actual band in the movie itself seems to be Carax commenting on what he must realize is over-reaching in other sections; is it to be taken seriously, really, when we see the lead singer or whomever it is doing a weird body movement while the abdomen is covered in red? There's even a trippy dream scene with characters in a river of blood that treads that pretension line: you can sense the filmmaker behind it is so happy with how it came out as mad as it is, and it's actually quite an eye-full. Carax also pulls off one of the most explicit sex scenes in film history (full penetration, among other acts of foreplay), and this oddly enough does serve an emotional point- it feels eerie in the light, but strangely intimate.All of this adds up to what then? Is Pola X worth watching? If you're familiar already with/admire Carax's work, it's a pretty safe bet as an act of semi-experimentation. For a first-timer to his work, like myself, it's a hit or miss experience, but one I wasn't too upset at having. At the least, one can say, Carax didn't go to the lengths of the man who directed a film Carax once starred in: Godard's King Lear. 6.5/10

The X in Pola X refers to the fact that this was apparently the tenth version of the script - and after going through the two-hour ordeal of watching this confused, pretentious, would-be art-house piece of nonsense, I would hate to see any of the other nine versions.The plot? Never mind, it goes something like this: a depressed French writer sees a woman one and (for whatever reason is beyond me) thinks she is his sister. He follows her to Paris, joins a Yugoslavian trash/noise orchestra, the members of which live in a dilapidated industrial building, and becomes a sick and destitute cliché of an auteur. Finally, the woman gets run over by a lorry, which was greeted with enthusiastic applause by the (by then exasperated) cinema audience. It will probably start making sense after you've had your sixteenth gin and tonic.I suppose most viewers went to see this film because a) the director, Leos Carax, made the altogether wonderful "Les Amants de Pont-Neuf" a couple of years earlier, or b) it reportedly featured a steamy, real-life sex scene between the two main characters. "Les Amants" was indeed a true masterpiece, which makes Pola X an even more monstrous disappointment. The love scene was ill-lit, hugely embarrassing, and about as entertaining or sensual as watching white paint dry. Come to think of it, I would probably find the paint more arousing.I saw several viewers leave the audience during the film, and those who did stay until the end were obviously quite happy it was over. By the time the third line of the end credits appeared on the screen, everybody had fled the cinema. Even if you have a flair for French cinema, don't go anywhere near this.

This movie is so unreal. French movies like these are just waste of time. Why watch this movie? Even, I did not know..why. What? The well known sex scene of half-siblings? Although the sex scene is so real and explicit, but the story it is based upon is so unreal. What is the use of it, then? Can you find easily in life, half sibling doing such things?Did I learn something from this movie? Yeah: some people are just so fond of wasting time making such movies, such stories, such non-sense. But for those who like nihilism, nothingness in life, or simply a life without hope, then there you are.. you've got to see this movie.Only one worth adoring, though: CATHERINE DENEUVE. She's such a strikingly beautiful woman.