_{^{· The Finical Filmgoer ·}}

I invited my dear neighbor, the penetrating Monsieur Objectif — composer, gentleman gardener and friend — to my bachelor pad for a light repast and a screening of the degenerate étude from Leos Carax, Pola X.

We dined on small bits of filet mignon over a medley of mixed squashes with Sage, and a sourish Argentine Chardonnay I dug out from the ice box. M. Objectif, always thoughtful, brought madeleines (that small shell-shaped French delectation of flour, eggs, sugar and butter) for sybaritic nibbling during the film.

An unexpected wallow in a fetid and destructive romanticism, Pola X (1999) contains extremely graphic scenes of erotic degradation and stars Guilliame Depardieu (son of Gerard), Catherine Deneuve, Delphine Chuillot, Laurent Lucas and the utterly strange Russian bird Yekaterina Golubeva as the character upon whom our story is impaled.

The film blooms like a piece of sophisticated soft core: exquisite real estate erotica (an 18th century chateau) enveloping elegant people, beautiful clothes, indolent poetic exchanges, and incestuous sexual maneuvers. A wealthy young man and his seductive mother plan his wedding to a spoiled socialite, as the boy's first novel emerges a cult hit. All is lush, coddled privilege, a bower of sensuality, flirtations. The French!

And yet our unseasoned young man is gripped by feverish dreams of a mysterious woman with dark, tangled hair, and he is astonished to encounter her one evening by a forest at twilight. A strange and cryptic wastrel, in a breathless and high-pitched speech she informs him that she is in fact his long-lost, abandoned sister. Her tale of woe, poverty and the damages of foreign war transform the impressionable boy into a revolutionary on the spot.

He renounces the chateau, Deneuve and his betrothed and escapes to Paris with the tormented girl and her gypsy companions. And thus his dream-like life of privilege and beauty devolves into a nightmare of loss, passionate abandon, dank sexuality, cult madness and terrorism.

Director Carax is known in France as an enfant terrible. His disorienting, rapturous film, based on Herman Melville's gothic follow-up novel to Moby-Dick, is as captivating as it is disturbing.

Unquieted in the extreme, my dear Monsieur Objectif departed abruptly at the end credits, his madeleines forgotten.

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^{_{More film reviews:}}

^{_{The Golden Bowl
The Innocents
Tolérance
Basic Instinct}}

^{_{As inspiration for his tiny artwork created to illustrate this text, Monsieur Chariot would like to credit Gustave Courbet's 1866 oil on canvas , L’Origine du monde}}