r.i.p. girlhood

guillaume depardieu, love of my sixteen-year-old life, has passed away. oddly, i seem to have a startling knack of picking favorite foreign actors who die in tragic circumstances. several years back, just days after my brother gave me a poster of sergei bodrov jr., he died in an ice slide in georgia. i still put the poster up though, with purple ribbon draped around it (i didn’t have any black crepe).

so i went through my netflix and bumped up ‘pola x’. i did love ‘the lovers on the bridge’, also by carax. the film is based (quite loosely, i assume) on a story by melville. pierre has just written a hit novel, anonymously, and has a very creepy relationship with his mother, played by catherine deneuve, largely wasted in such a dreary, uninteresting part, in that they refer to each other as brother and sister, and spend a lot of time lounging around inappropriately and smoking. pierre has a pretty fiancée, lucie, who has absolutely no personality. everyone is wealthy and wears beige. pierre has been having some unsettling dreams about a strange dark haired woman, and has an unsettling cousin named thibault, and it is suggested that inappropriate things have happened between him, pierre, and lucie. the family gets even kookier when the dark-haired woman actually shows up, a russian woman calling herself isabelle, and claiming to be the bastard child of pierre’s dead father. things go downhill fairly swiftly from here.

one thing that certainly doesn’t help is the fact that katerina golubeva as isabelle is a painfully bad actress. i suppose she’s mainly just there to look at, although she does bring to mind a compilation of the nightclub pair in ‘brideshead revisited’, that is, death’s head and the sickly child. she looks like a recently exhumed corpse. her french is very bad, and it’s never clear exactly how she and a few fellow refugees (fleeing a genocide?) turned up at pierre’s mother’s house. since incest seems to be the norm in the entire family, neither pierre nor isabelle give their technical relationship a second thought, never even questioning pierre’s mother on the subject, and, once they have made a new home in a warehouse also inhabited by what is either a relentlessly bad experimental orchestra, a paramilitary organization, or both, they embark upon one of the most explicit, icky sex scenes that i have ever had the pleasure to fast-forward through. through the whole thing are various tragedies, some awfully prescient, like pierre in several scrapes on his motorcycle, which is how depardieu came to lose a leg not long after. like all good french films, things go to hell with surprising swiftness. i did like an odd moment early on, when thibault drops a quote from james’s ‘the wings of the dove’ (‘we shall never again be as we were’), but the moment is spoiled when the line is later used as lyrics in a painfully bad french hip-hop song.

i wish that i’d picked a depardieu film that was just a tad more enjoyable, but as he did appear in a number of stinkers, i think i’ll just wait for ‘the duchess of langeais’ to come out.