Pola X
Directed by Leos Carax
It All Starts Today
Directed by Bertrand Tavernier
Human Resources
Directed by Laurent Cantet

There's a word some of France's cockier film critics use to describe the more arty films the French industry churn out, films like Alice is Having an Affair with Marcel while Walking Her Dog--"nombriliste," or navel-gazing. What's their solution? A dose of shock therapy to the subsidized film industry, a few more films with a little more testosterone, perhaps even Gerard Depardieu buffing up? "The remedy looks worse than the disease," Daniel Singer commented when ideas like this were mooted a few years back.

But at its best, there is something peculiar and refreshingly different about French

Human Resouces © 2000 SHOOTING GALLERY

cinema--a symptom of its distinguished auteurist heritage but also a reflection of France's radically different economic, political and cultural reflexes, which have led to some of the most politically daring films in recent memory. Three films in particular deal with what Singer described as "the discontent pent up below the glittering surface of our smug consumer society," and, particularly in the wake of the huge revolt in the winter of 1995, the forms of struggle against the advancing neoliberal tide.

Leos Carax, who's probably too old now to be dubbed the enfant terrible of French cinema, finds poetry in squalor, incorporating, as Jean Douchet has noted, "a sensation of lightness and vanished celestial grace." However, his new film, Pola X--which is based on Melville's difficult novel Pierre, or the Ambiguities--moves from lightness to dark. Carax has said that he spent the time since his last film, the big-budget meltdown Lovers on the Bridge, "in hell"; Pola X is his report back.