Pola X

Pola X is a 1999 French drama film directed by Leos Carax and starring Guillaume Depardieu, Yekaterina Golubeva and Catherine Deneuve. The film is loosely based on the Herman Melville novel Pierre: or, The Ambiguities. It revolves around a young novelist who is confronted by a woman who claims to be his lost sister, and the two begin a romantic relationship. The film title is an acronym of the French title of the novel, Pierre ou les ambiguïtés, plus the Roman numeral "X" indicating the tenth draft version of the script that was used to make the film.
The film was entered into the 1999 Cannes Film Festival. Pola X has been associated by some with the New French Extremity.
Pierre lives a carefree life with his widowed mother in a Normandy chateau, enjoying rising fame as a pseudonymous author. He also visits Lucie, his fiancée and childhood friend, at her parents' chateau. In a bar he sees his cousin Thibault, a stockbroker, who says he is welcome to stay at Thibault's apartment in Paris but wonders why Pierre is being followed by a young vagrant woman. When Pierre turns to look, the woman runs away.
Driving through the forest, Pierre is disturbed to see the vagrant woman, who resembles a ghostly figure from his dreams. She tells him in a strong foreign accent that she is his half-sister Isabelle and recounts her unhappy life. She and her two companions (a Romanian woman, Razerka, and a small girl) are apparently refugees from conflict in Eastern Europe.
Abandoning his home, mother and fiancée, Pierre takes Isabelle to Paris and goes to see Thibault, who bitterly insists he doesn't recognise the man and throws them out. Wandering the streets of Paris, fearful of deportation, the group find a cheap hotel. Pierre rejects his previous ideas for a second novel in favour of a grittier, more mature work that reflects the hidden truths of life. His publisher warns that his sophomoric pursuit of harsh truths will result in affected and inferior work compared to the youthful innocence that comes naturally to him, and refuses his request for an advance.
At the zoo, Pierre misanthropically tells the small girl that the animals act unhappy because to them, all humans stink. She is slapped by an adult stranger after telling random people in the street that they stink, falls, and incurs a head wound she dies from. Again fearful of deportation, Pierre, Isabelle, and Razerka leave her body and proceed to a run-down warehouse commandeered by a terroristic cult; apparently in exchange for chaperoning Razerka safely to a man she knows there, Pierre and Isabelle are given lodging with the group, who train for guerrilla warfare and practise industrial music. Pierre and Isabelle succumb to the incestuous passion that had been coalescing till that point.
Pierre scribbles away in a daze punctuated by learning of his mother's death (apparently a suicide) while trying to find his whereabouts. In the winter Lucie, suffering from a recurring fever, finds Pierre at the warehouse and demands to stay there under a false identity to 'protect' Isabelle from the truth of his abandonment of her, accepting Pierre's disappearance and relationship with Isabelle out of love for him. Pierre similarly keeps the nature of his ties to Isabelle from Lucie. Isabelle feels inadequate and desperately tries to ingratiate herself with the two, offering to take care of Lucie during her periods of sickness. Desperate to raise funds, Pierre makes an appearance on television to reveal his true identity but finds some in the television audience disbelieving him and others hostile because of his disconnection to his debut novel.
Pierre's long days of writing continue through the winter; at one point he dreams of him and Isabelle copulating and then drowning in a river of blood. During a walk by the Seine, the trio happen upon an autobiography of Pierre's father: he is alarmed when Isabelle seems not to recognise the man on the cover, supposedly their father whom Isabelle said she had met once. Despairing over the doubt in her she fears she has instilled in Pierre, Isabelle attempts suicide and goes to hospital where a vengeful Thibault reveals Lucie's true identity to her.
Pierre is brutally rejected by his publisher after submitting his manuscript anonymously, and Isabelle confronts him over his deception of her. Pierre despairs on seeing Lucie debasing herself by living in the squat and at the ruination of his plans; he accepts an invitation from Thibault to fight and steals two handguns from the cult to confront his cousin in central Paris, where Pierre immediately shoots Thibault in the head and is arrested. In despair at losing Pierre, Isabelle insists to him that she was always telling the truth and throws herself in front of a vehicle as he is driven to jail.
The soundtrack was produced by Scott Walker and features some instrumental tracks by him, as well as contributions by Sonic Youth and Bill Callahan, who also has a cameo appearance in the film.
An alternative longer TV version entitled "Pierre ou les ambiguïtés", edited into three episodes containing an additional 40 minutes of footage, was shown for the first time on 24 September 2001 on Arte German-French TV channel. The episodes were titled A la lumière, A l'ombre des lumières and Dans le sang.
Carax edited the TV version in the spirit of serials from his childhood, in particular Vidocq. The new scenes in the alternative version were produced during the original shoot with additional budget raised by producer Bruno Pesery to allow them to exceed their contractually agreed 140-minute running time. Some of the new sequences explore the dreams of Peter and his relationship with his mother, sister and fiancée, while others lengthen or alter existing scenes. In an interview with Jacques Morice, Carax stated that, "it is not an 'extended version' or a 'final version' of the film Pola X, but a different proposition for television."
Since the miniseries' original broadcast in 2001, it has only been screened very rarely at exhibition events, and has not received an official release on streaming or home video of any kind to date. In late 2021 a digitised recording of a VHS tape containing this version was illegally leaked onto the internet via an unknown source, and it was translated into English for the first time.