POLA X

The French know how to "do" smut better than anyone else. No, let me rephrase that... I think the French know how to make smut and peddle it as "arty" and "risqué", which gets people running to the art-house theaters and video stores hoping for a little naughty titillation under the guise of being intellectual.

But in my experience (I have to admit the controversy lures me every time), the smut always ends up being a disappointment. Either it is astonishingly unerotic (the French are also masters of creating bored and beautiful-yet-unappealing characters) or the controversial material makes up a disappointingly miniscule part of the film. That said, let's get to Pola X.

Pola X caused some controversy and buzz at film festivals when it was released. People where shocked and titillated by the idea that this somewhat major film (director Leos Carax made The Girl on the Bridge) had sex that was, well, quite explicit. The sex, of course, is what the movie press picked up on, and Pola X became one of those films that probably got most of its art-house audience lining up to see smut. But in this case, the smut is literally about two minutes of an over two-hour film.

The story is based on Herman Melville's Pierre, Or, The Ambiguities. Pierre (Guillaume Depardieu) is a pretty-boy who is a successful author, has a beautiful fiancée, and a beautiful mother (Catherine Denueve). Everybody loves him and thinks he's brilliant, and his life is pretty much conflict-free. But lately he has been haunted by these images of a mysterious woman, both in his dreams, and then in real-life. She spies on him in cafes, stalks him around the city, then flees when he tries to talk to her.

He finally confronts the woman, who says she is his long lost half-sister, the child of a woman that his late father had an affair with on one of his ambassador-type visits to the Balkans. Well! Pierre's life is thrown for a loop, darks secrets come out of the closet, and suddenly he realizes how sheltered and safe his life has been. His solution: to take this woman Isabelle under his protection (as she is a refugee), which gets him disowned from his fortune, shunned by his family, and tossed out of society. Not only that, but now that he has had some "real-life" experience, his follow-up to his hugely successful first novel is deemed crap, as he toils away in their slum home, writing with a new passion that he had never known before.

Pola X, unlike other recent French smut like Romance, is not crap. It actually maintained my interest for most of the film, even though the character of Pierre wasn't as intriguing as he (or the filmmakers) liked to think he was. All the women fall all over him, thinking he's brilliant, when in my eyes what he really needed was a good kick-in-the-ass. Not only that, but Pierre has a bit of an incestual leaning with the women in his family. Hmmm... maybe that's a French thing, who knows... but I guess if Catherine Denueve is your mother, the rules change, eh?

As for the two minutes of smut: Yes, it was porn-quality explicit, and filmed in an arty enough way where you couldn't help but wonder if it WAS the actual actors having sex (because someone sure was, I can tell you that!). But the scene actually blended well with the story, and was presented in a matter-of-fact way that was actually part of the plot. It is not really something that we needed to see in so much detail, but at the same time, you have to wonder what all the fuss was about.