EXTREMITIES
By Chris Dashiell

The suffering artist - the artist as outcast, rebel, scapegoat, and painful conscience of the times - is, with just a few exceptions, a creature of the modern age. It was only with the advent of industrialism that the artist began to stand for something which ran counter to the ways of society at large. Often we tend to forget that the romantics were, first and foremost, disillusioned - with the spoiled certainties of reason as well as religion, the family as well as the state.

Herman Melville was one of them. In Pierre, the novel that followed Moby Dick, he sought to portray, through a typically mysterious symbolism, the plight of the artist who finds his vision and calling opposed by the world around him. Leos Carax's latest film, POLA X, transposes Melville's novel to our time, and substitutes a feverish emotional intensity for the book's dense parody of gothic convention. The result retains some of Melville's mystery, misses his sense of irony, but succeeds to some degree in staking out a disturbing territory of its own.

Pierre (Guillaume Depardieu) has already written a best-seller under a pseudonym. He lives in a country chateau with his mother (Catherine Deneuve), a wealthy socialite whose relationship with her son borders on the incestuous. He is engaged to be married to a lovely young woman named Lucie (Delphine Chuillot), the cousin of his best friend Thibault (Laurent Lucas). His life seems well in order, as if nicely wrapped in a cocoon of privilege and pleasure. But he feels a vague sense that something is missing.

After glimpsing a street girl (Yekaterina Golubyova) foraging through the garbage for food, her face starts to invade his dreams. When he shares this with Lucie, she is apprehensive. Then he notices that the strange girl seems to be following him. Finally confronting her, she tells him - in a long, remarkable sequence shot in a forest - that she is his half-sister Isabelle, who at one time lived with the family, but was then rejected and expelled by Pierre's late, tyrannical father.

The rest of the film explores Pierre's extraordinary reponse to his discovery of Isabelle. First he becomes thoroughly convinced by her story. Then he finds himself feeling estranged from his mother, his fiancee, and his surroundings. Suddenly he leaves everything behind and moves to Paris with Isabelle. They live in poverty among refugees and vagabonds; they break sacred taboos. Pierre works on a new book, which takes on gigantic dimensions. The three important people from his former life have different reactions to him. His mother tries to get him to return. His fiancee tries to join him. His friend becomes his enemy.

The metaphor is clear enough - the muse as a lost sister/lover who pulls the artist away from society to the dangers of life on the margins. Carax's direction, full of eccentric editing flourishes and bold eruptions of imagery, lends it the air of an ominous and inscrutable dream. Sometimes the material seems to get away from him - I was puzzled by apparent ellipses in the storyline (and who are these people making bizarre music in a warehouse?) - but more often his audacity pays off by drawing the viewer deeper into the mystery. The film also benefits from the terrific Scott Walker music - a great romantic score in the old style.

The young Depardieu has a strong presence here, from the feckless young man of the early sections through his gradual transformation into a raging, crippled loner. His last scenes are certainly a stretch - I can't say he succeeds exactly, but there's no shame in the attempt. Golubyova has an understandably difficult time embodying what is basically a mad allegory. Although her voice and manner lack emotional range, this actually tends to work in her favor. I can almost believe that this person has lived in the woods all her life.

POLA X (the title is as weird as the movie - an acronym for Melville's book and the number of screenplay drafts) is what I would call an intuitive film. Convoluted, enigmatic, structurally a mess but with a feeling of single-minded determination - it's like an explosion of the unconscious onto celluloid. Carax has plenty of critics, but I admire his transgressive energy and his willingness to keep trying new things, be they foolish or brave. This movie is both.

Another voyage to the outer limits, albeit totally different in style and purpose, is provided by Darren Aronofsky in REQUIEM FOR A DREAM. Living legend Hubert Selby Jr. here adapts, with the director's help, his own novel about addiction. If you've read Selby you may better appreciate what Aronofsky has achieved here - a nearly precise equivalent of the author's prose style in terms of film editing. The entire picture is constructed to match the images with the rhythm of the soundtrack and musical score - and since the story takes place in the minds of a bunch of junkies, the effect is one of an ever-increasing sense of powerlessness, a descent into total degradation and horror.

Harry (Jared Leto) is an addict who shares love and heroin with his girlfriend Marion (Jennifer Connelly), while hoping to make it big as a dealer with his shooting buddy Tyrone (Marlon Wayans). Harry's only family is his widowed mother Sara (Ellen Burstyn) who lives alone in a dingy apartment, and from whom he periodically steals a television in order to feed his habit. Sara is transfixed by the TV, which seems to represent fulfillment to her. After she receives a telemarketing phone call, she starts to believe that she is going to appear on TV herself, and her anxieties about her weight and eating habits lead her to get hooked on prescription amphetamines.

The film cuts back and forth between the agony of this poor old woman, and the wild, self-destructive life of the young addicts, making the not-too-subtle point that they are different symptoms of the same general disease, an attempt to escape an intolerable reality. In Sara's case we have the addiction of popular "culture," exemplified by a weird, scary motivational program - part infomercial, part game show - that seems to be the only thing on the TV. I can't say that this symbolism works very well. It seems garish, overwrought, and in the end, too obvious a target for Selby and Aronofsky to knock down.

Although I found her character to be the least compelling aspect of the movie, I have to admit that Burstyn does as well in the part as anyone could ever be expected to. The final stages of her madness are particularly good. Leto and Wayans are fine, and Connelly is even better. She brings a rough, wounded quality to her role that gives her scenes a special poignancy. But ultimately this is not really an actor's movie. Everything lies in the direction, with a tip of the hat to editor Jay Rabinowitz and the music of Clint Mansell.

Aronofsky relies too heavily on certain motifs - the quick cuts of the popping, snorting and shooting become more like a stylistic tic than a conscious effect - and the maniacal rhythm sometimes makes the picture seem like a huge cuckoo clock with a minute hand that keeps conking you on the head. Despite all these reservations, I left the theater very affected by the mood of Requiem for a Dream. The final sequence, an extremely rapid series of cuts between different versions of hell on earth, set out to shock me, and it succeeded. And this is due, I think, not only to the director's virtuosic technique, but to the film's keen sense (one of the best I've ever encountered) of what it really feels like to live inside the head of a hopelessly addicted dope fiend.

Uplift is the curse that hangs over movies. Even good movies have to suffer being marketed as "feel good," because the folks who promote them think that films are meant, like a baby's pacifier, to reassure us. BILLY ELLIOT is a good movie. If the "feel good" tag pulls the audiences in, I suppose that's for the best, but I hope they notice that the movie pays its respects to the harsher realities of life.

The story concerns a working class boy in the north of England who develops a passion, against the wishes and expectations of his father and brother, in the ballet. While the men are involved in a bitter coal strike (the film takes place in the days of Margaret Thatcher) the boy reclaims the part of himself which is still bonded to his dead mother, and liberates his painful feelings through dancing. He is aided by a tough but kind ballet instructor (Julie Walters) who helps him to face his father in order to convince him that Billy's interests are worth fighting for as well.

This all seems rather schematic as a plot summary, but the direction and performances give it a certain freshness. The director, Stephen Daldry, succeeds by going against the grain of naturalism. At crucial points in the story, he has Billy express his conflicts and emotions through dance numbers, as if his life is a musical and he is the star. There's even a fight between strikers and cops that is staged like a dance sequence. This is much more effective than any kitchen-sink realism could ever be.

One of Daldry's decisions was smarter, and more fortunate, than any other. He chose an unknown, thirteen-year-old Jamie Bell, to play the title role. Bell is a good dancer, but he seems to be an even better actor. He conveys a strong sense of inward oppression, anger and frustration that, balanced with exuberance and open-heartedness, really brings the character to life.

This is Daldry's first feature, and occasionally it shows. Sometimes the feelings are too broad or the supporting roles mere caricatures. In one scene towards the end he has Billy behave in a way that, in my opinion, is not believable - for the sole purpose of lending suspense to a scene, and then dragging it on too long as well. But the drama usually hits the right buttons. It is especially satisfying to see the father (Gary Lewis) gradually ennobled by a recognition of love for his son.

The rigidity of gender roles has been a hot topic in films lately. Restrictive notions of masculinity are particulary damaging to boys. The message of this film couldn't be more welcome. (Curious how aspects of Billy Elliot are the mirror image of Girlfight - here the boy rejects boxing in favor of ballet, there the girl chooses boxing, both against the wishes of the father.) The movie goes to some pains emphasizing that a love for ballet doesn't equal being gay. Then, to be even-handed, it includes a sympathetic portrait of a boy - a friend of Billy's - who is coming to terms with just that. It takes a sensitve hand to avoid mawkishness in these circumstances. Daldry shows that he has the touch.

Billy Elliot is not a great film, but it's quite a good one, and oh yes, I can admit it - I "felt good."

CineScene, 2000