*** POLA X

BROTHER? SISTER? Pierre and his mother behave with more than familial affection.

Nazi Stuka dive-bombers blow up cemeteries at the beginning of Leos Carax’s latest effusion, and the horror and hilarity of that black-and-white archival footage lurks beneath every overwrought frame to follow. Based on Pierre; or the Ambiguities, Herman Melville’s follow-up novel to Moby-Dick, Pola X rejoices in the hyper-romanticism of its source and courts Pierre’s resounding failure. Pierre more or less finished the job Moby-Dick started on undoing Melville’s career — and Pola X hardly seems likely to rehabilitate Carax, whose star dimmed with Lovers on the Bridge, a brilliant debacle finished in 1991 but not released in the United States until last year. Is it the filmmaker’s self-indulgence or his unflinching regard for what his modern-day Pierre (Guillaume Depardieu) describes as “the great lie hidden behind everything” that puts so many off while eliciting the admiration of an ardent few? Maybe it’s a little of both.

Little of the lie Pierre refers to is evident early on in Pola X (the title is an acronym of Pierre; ou les ambiguïtés, with the “X” referring to Carax’s 10th version of the story), with its sparkling estates shot in refulgent daylight and its happy blond, beautiful people in bleached linens. Played by a willowy Depardieu, Pierre soars on a motorcycle down tree-canopied lanes to the château of his fiancée, the luminously named Lucie (Delphine Chuillot), and climbs naked into her sun-drenched bed to awaken her. Later, they tool over to the local bookstore, where they note that his novel In the Light, written under the pseudonym “Aladin,” continues to sell briskly; then he heads solo to his own aristocratic digs to nuzzle over cocktails with his stunning mother, Marie (Catherine Deneuve). What more could a guy want?

Ambiguities, however, shadow this brightness. Marie’s relationship to Pierre is unclear at first — they call each other “brother” and “sister” and behave with more than familial affection. Thibault (Laurent Lucas), a once close, now long-estranged cousin, returns to darken the landscape with his brunette hair, his black clothes, and his job at the Chicago Stock exchange — not to mention a name evocative of Romeo’s arch-enemy. And Pierre has been dreaming of a dark girl in a forest, her face veiled by night.

Of course, the girl appears. Her name is Isabelle (Katerina Golubeva) and the story she tells in pidgin French is a gothic nightmare. She is Pierre’s half-sister, sired by their father when he was a diplomat in the Balkans and abandoned to the horrors of war. His world shattered by this revelation, Pierre scoops up Isabelle, as well as her unexplained companion Razerka (Petruta Catana) and an even more mysterious child (Mihaella Silaghi), and flees. At first to Paris, where his ménage’s illegal-immigrant status brings them more ostracism and misery, and finally to a huge abandoned factory on the city outskirts, where a band of Godardian guerrilla artistes under a mysterious Chief (aquiline filmmaker Sharunas Bartas) pounds out Stomp-style music and engages in target practice with nude mannequins.

There, Pierre consummates his desire for his half-sibling, though given Isabelle’s zombie-like mien and her ranting about corpses, the act might be construed as more necrophilia than incest (notwithstanding their lovemaking scene, the most graphic and beautiful in recent cinema). Stripped of the shining lies of his name and past, restored to his suppressed darker self, Pierre can at last confront the truth and write his new novel.

Just what the world needs, another novel about the “truth.” What that truth might be, however, remains more vague than ambiguous, and as Pierre grows more hirsute and hobbled, so does the movie, exploding into purple passages and empty climaxes. Until the final third, Pola X has the sleekest narrative of all of Carax’s films, and it also shows more maturity and confidence in its precise, near surreal imagery, which is edited with heartbreaking panache. Of all the major filmmakers working today, Carax, for better and worse, best fits the description “visionary.”

Somewhere along the line, however, the man lost his sense of humor (you can see it in all its puckish whimsy in his early films Boy Meets Girl and Bad Blood. Like the dive-bombers at the beginning of Pola X, he belabors the dead bones of the world to uncover the truth — when what he really needs to do is lighten up.

Leos Carax marks his spot with Pola X WAR AND PUNISHMENT? Leos Carax’s next effort might be a light comedy with Cameron Diaz or a tragic film about Russia and America. It might not have been a conscious plan, but the career of French filmmaker Leos Carax has eerily paralleled that of his idol, Herman Melville. Melville’s early seafaring novels were hits; Carax’s first two youthful films, Boy Meets Girl (1984) and Bad Blood (1986), were greeted with enthusiasm. But with his third film, Lovers on the Bridge (1991), Carax collided with his own Great White Whale. Costly and condemned by critics, it sunk out of sight, not to be released in this country until last year. Undaunted, Carax chose for his next project an adaptation of Melville’s Pierre; or the Ambiguities, which, written after Moby Dick, was an even greater critical and commercial disaster for the author. Was the enigmatic director tempting fate? “No,” he replies tersely over the phone from Paris. “I don’t think in terms of career. I’m not a cinéaste, really. I don’t make film after film. I’ve made only four films in 20 years. Every once in a while I wake up and make a movie.” In this case, he woke up from a nightmare of bombers blowing up cemeteries, an image that he re-created in the film’s startling opening sequence. “To start a project, for me there has to be at least one coincidence. The project cannot be just a dream or a good idea. It’s like editing — there has to be two things at least. Here the coincidence was that I had this book I read when I was 19 and I was thinking of adapting it 12 years later, at the same age as Melville when he wrote it. But I thought, I’d never find the boy and the girl to act in this film. And one day I saw a few images on a screen in Berlin of a woman’s face. I thought, this was Isabelle. I found out she was a Russian actress [Katerina Golubeva]. I thought the film was beautiful and the girl was wonderful, and I thought I had Isabelle. But there was a problem — this is a French film and the girl is Russian. What can I do with that? “A year or two later I accepted an invitation to go to Sarajevo during the war to present Lovers on the Bridge . I had been sick for three years so I didn’t go, but in ’94 I did go: I went for five days and I stayed five months. For the first time I understood a bit about the war. When I came back, I had a dream that is the opening of the film. Planes dropping bombs on these cemeteries. And I woke up and thought, this war is like both modern wars and very old barbaric wars. It’s not enough to kill the living people — they have to kill the dead, too. And I imagined that Isabelle, the girl in the film, could actually be a creature who comes out of these graves and comes toward the camera like a phantom. I had this image. So I had a book, a girl, and a war. I could start working.” One thing Carax admits he lacked was Melville’s sense of irony. That was not always the case. “I never see my films again, but a few months ago I was away, and on the foreign TV I saw my first film, Boy Meets Girl, about 10 minutes of it. And I was very surprised that there were attempts at being funny. I guess in my last films there is no humor, or very little. But it could come back. I don’t think it’s something I lost. I started making films at the same time I was discovering films, which is not often the case. Usually people go to school to learn, or they work as assistants or something. I discovered film and three weeks later I was shooting, and I was shooting my first feature. So these first two films are really a young man’s films, a young man playing.” Carax may be more playful in his next project, which he hopes to make in English. “I’m very ambivalent. I want to do a light comedy with Cameron Diaz or do a tragic film on Russia and America called War and Punishment.” — PK