Pierre ou, les ambiguïtés

So the rule for cultural Europe is to organise the death of the art of living, which still flourishes […] When it’s time to close the book, I will have no regrets. I’ve seen so many people live so badly, and so many die so well.

— Jean Luc-Godard, Je vous salue, Sarajevo (1993).

Proclaimed by Jacques Rivette to be “the most beautiful film of the decade,” Leos Carax’s Pola X (1999) is nevertheless menacing: an apocalyptic nightmare of ego death and breached taboos, coloured with shades of dull brown and absinthe green.¹ It is unsurprising, then, that it was borne from a convergence of personal and collective traumas. The period between Carax’s previous feature, the glorious commercial failure Les Amants du Pont-Neuf (The Lovers on the Bridge, 1991), and Pola X was marked by spells of illness and romantic freefall for Carax. Adapted from Herman Melville’s decadent epic novel Pierre; or The Ambiguities (1852) and set in a simultaneously utopian and dystopian pre-Y2K France, Pola X feels wrought from the void: displaced from the dynamic, postmodern style already established by the director, as well as from any recognisable genre category, and created with an entirely new cast of collaborators. Deemed beguiling yet inscrutable by critics upon its release, the film debuted an upended cinematic language which exchanged the absurdist levity of Carax’s previous features with a near-melodramatic sincerity. “It is perhaps my most unfriendly film,” said Carax in 2002. “But I feel it’s my best work so far.”² A year prior, he had doubled down on the film’s unerring vision by re-editing a three-episode iteration titled Pierre ou, les ambiguïtés (2001), to air on the German-French TV channel, ARTE. Rather than using the extended duration allowed by the TV commission to clarify the enigmas of Pola X, in Pierre Carax only further mystified them, heightening the sensation of an inescapable, stygian maze.

Reflecting more than a personal, artistic crisis, Carax’s doom-cloaked adaptation was also directly imprinted by recent geopolitical ruptures – namely by the director’s affinity with the struggles of ethnic Bosniaks and Croats during the genocidal campaign wrought by Serbian forces between 1992 and 1995. This context is essential to Carax’s interpretation of Melville’s narrative, itself set amidst a white American family whose legacy proudly depends on the genocide of Indigenous peoples, and to the film’s overarching atmosphere of fragmentation and paranoia, crystallised by Scott Walker’s oneiric score. For the inaugural Sarajevo Film Festival in 1995, a DIY act of creative resistance spearheaded by festival founder Mirsad Purivatra saw Carax bring videotapes of his earlier features, which were screened in underground vaults to civilians living in the warzone. “Pola X […] would not have been possible if I had not been in Sarajevo during the war,” Carax since reflected while revisiting the festival in 2013.³ The film trails the unravelling of the bucolic bourgeois life of writer-wunderkind Pierre Valombreuse (Guillaume Depardieu, son of Gerard Depardieu) after a mysterious Slavic outsider, Isabelle (Katerina Golubeva), confesses to be his half-sister: the forgotten firstborn of Pierre’s late diplomat father. In ragged French, Isabelle recounts her exile from the Valombreuse chateau as a small child due to the neuroses of her stepmother, Marie (Catherine Deneuve), and alludes to the ravaging of her home village by bombs and flames, leaving only “corpses”. Isabelle, we assume, is an undocumented refugee from besieged Bosnia. Seduced, Pierre abandons his impending marriage with the cherubic Lucie (Delphine Chuillot) to live hand-to-mouth with Isabelle in Paris as her brother, carer, and – later – her lover. 

In a 1991 interview with Les Inrockuptibles, Serge Kaganski asks Carax about when he first came to like movies, to which Carax responds: “I loved women on screen from a very young age. But cinema itself came quite late.”⁴ Largely uninterested in auteurist histories, for Carax cinema is both motivated and defined by the presence of women. All you need to make a movie is a girl. Throughout his career, Carax has emphasised the centrality of actresses to his oeuvre – not simply as muses but as co-creators and, often, romantic partners: Carax and Golubeva, who shared a daughter, Nastya Golubeva Carax, were companions up until Golubeva’s death by suicide in 2011. According to Carax, “It was the discovery of Katerina Golubeva’s face, glimpsed fleetingly on a screen in Berlin, that allowed the film [Pola X] to come into being.”⁵ As Isabelle, Golubeva exudes an effortless intensity. She speaks rarely, but with a deep, chilling voice, and she possesses the discomfiting beauty of an Egon Schiele figure – complemented by the organic, unsensational framing of cinematographer Éric Gautier (a frequent collaborator of Olivier Assayas). Often, Golubeva shields her eyes from the camera with lashings of hair and a cowering posture, as if her gaze is too dangerous to be witnessed. In their often-pretentious book-length study of Carax, Fergus Daly and Garin Dowd narrowly interpret Isabelle as a fragment of Pierre’s psyche, a shadow representing the experience the ingénu lacks, and thus the sex they share as a kind of “fusion”, or act of cathartic self-realisation, for Pierre.⁶ This reading undermines Isabelle’s singularity, and indicates a broader discursive pattern among critics of overlooking the significance of women and actresses to Carax’s cinema. Golubeva’s Isabelle, who upon meeting Pierre describes herself as being one with the animals, the earth, the trees, and the dead, is more than a character. The film’s spiritual core and the locus of its action, Isabelle is an elemental force capable of disturbing French high society at its very roots.

From his already-masterful first short, Strangulation Blues (1980) up until Les Amants, Carax refined the character of the mercurial young outsider, most often embodied by the scowling actor-acrobat Denis Lavant. While Carax’s pre-Pola X work repeatedly explored the lives of social outcasts (the homeless, the orphaned, the ill, the suicidal, and the incarcerated), Pola X signalled a shift in his focus to the figure of the refugee, and towards the relationship between image-making and political violence. These subjects have since endured through Carax and Lavant’s invention of the inhuman character Monsieur Merde (in Tokyo!, 2008) – the disruptive, primordial manifestation of a nation’s xenophobic fantasies. Most recently, in Carax’s playful essay film C’est pas moi (It’s Not Me, 2024), the archival retelling of his autobiography as a cinéaste is punctured by recognitions of the medium’s unresolved and ongoing complicity in acts of war. In the opening credits of Pola X, the narrated Shakespearean adage, “The time is out of joint” introduces a barrage of archival footage of German jets bombing Polish cemeteries during World War II. While these images suggest a continuum between Nazism and the genocide of Bosnians which has displaced Isabelle, today they only further evoke traumatic repetitions of fascist violence, especially through desecrating the dead. In particular, they echo Israel’s bulldozing of Gazan cemeteries or the practice of anonymising the headstones of Palestinians killed by the state in an ongoing attempt to eradicate Palestinian existence and memory.⁷ “Men kill men, women, children…” Isabelle remembers of Bosnia, “And even kill corpses.” 

The title of Pola X, Carax has explained, combines an acronym of the French title of Melville’s source novel (Pierre; ou Les Ambiguïtés) with the Roman numeral for the number ten. Pola X used the tenth draft of the screenplay Carax co-wrote with Jean-Pol Fargeau and Lauren Sedofsky. In this way, the film was presented as an assemblage that could have been otherwise, as one of many versions of itself. This was affirmed with the announcement of Pierre, which disappeared from the public eye after airing until its restoration and subsequent re-emergence in 2026. Ahead of its original broadcast, Carax clarified Pierre was not a “final version” of Pola X, but a “different proposition, for television”, wherein he used the medium’s affordances to elaborate on the film’s tangential qualities, incorporating some new scenes while lengthening others, mostly with the aim of developing the protagonist’s relationships with Marie, Isabelle, and Lucie. Several of the scenes exclusive to Pierre are surreal dream sequences, including an early tableau of Pierre and Marie confined to a razed, desolate hellscape, and another in which Pierre discovers Isabelle’s childhood doll (now a decayed, tuber-like thing suspended in water) as Marie confesses she sent his sister away because she was “Deranged, on another planet.” With these additions, Carax further damns the cruelty of the Valombreuse family and the conservative society they represent, whose privilege relies on the abjection of Isabelle, here literally designated as an alien. Meanwhile, the repetitions inherent to the TV format emphasise themes of imperial terror, as the opening credits of each episode end with the same, eerie motif: a digital target roving a spinning silhouette of the earth, which appears distant and fragile.

Although commentators have placed Carax into various ill-fitting categories over the years, among them the Cinema du Look and New French Extremity movements, Carax has never identified with a particular scene, and only sparingly admits his overlaps with other filmmakers. Carax most consistently counts Jean-Luc Godard and Philippe Garrel – two of the most radical and uncompromising directors to emerge from the French New Wave and its aftermath – as peers and formative influences. Godard’s impression is clear from Carax’s earliest work: in the musicality of his montage, his love for American film noir, and his portrayal of the transformative powers of eros. Pola X and Pierre reveal further – and perhaps deeper – commonalities. Where Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville’s Ici et ailleurs (Here and Elsewhere, 1976) and Godard’s later short Je vous salue, Sarajevo (Hail, Sarajevo, 1993) lambast the function of culture – the realm of “television”, “tourism”, and “war” – in normalising acts of genocide in Palestine and Bosnia respectively, Pola X and Pierre similarly expose the dual mechanisms of fetishism and erasure that underly the French bourgeoisie’s treatment of refugees. Moreover, three years prior to the broadcast of Pierre, Godard concluded his decade-long televisual experiment Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988-1998) – a layered, digressional manifesto which broaches the interconnectedness of film and propaganda, and which passionately queries the failure of cinema to resist or reckon with mass atrocities, namely the Holocaust. Though vastly different projects, Pierre and Histoire(s) suggest Carax and Godard’s shared desire to pervert the TV serial’s association with marketing and didactic messaging to destabilise the status quo.   

If Pola X is, as Rivette claimed, the most beautiful film of the ’90s, perhaps this is in part a consequence of its sublime ugliness. Throughout his career, Carax has crafted transportive mise-en-scènes in which the gritty and grotesque coincide with a painterly elegance. This dynamic is highlighted by the starkly contradictory settings of Pola X, where the verdant hills and fresh linens of Normandy are soon swapped for an abandoned factory squat, where Isabelle and Pierre reside with a terrorist group cum industrial noise band. Carax’s casting of Deneuve in the role of Marie is similarly striking, meanwhile, with the actress’ sacred refinement here tinged with desperation and a surprising pallor. The relative absence of both Pola X and Pierre from the public eye – and their resulting exclusion from many conversations about Carax’s oeuvre – have long cast them as provocative, even superficial, oddities in the director’s career, little more than pitstops on the way to his much-celebrated masterwork Holy Motors (2012). Yet it is these works that perhaps most potently embody Carax’s lifelong devotion to a kind of earthen beauty that embraces waste, otherness, and despair. 

Pierre ou, les ambiguïtés/Pierre or, the Ambiguities (2001 France/Switzerland/Germany/Japan 174 mins)

Prod: Ruth Waldburger, Kenzo Horikoshi, Bruno Pésery, Karl Baumgartner Scr: Leos Carax, Jean-Pol Fargeau Dir: Leos Carax Phot: Éric Gautier Ed: Nelly Quettier Mus: Scott Walker Prod Des: Laurent Allaire, Dschingis Bowakow Art Dir: Eric Pech Cos Des: Esther Walz

Cast: Guillaume Depardieu, Yekaterina Golubeva, Catherine Deneuve, Delphine Chuillot, Laurent Lucas, Patachou, Petruta Catana

Endnotes