Pola X

Pola X (1999) is Leos Carax's fever-dream drama, available to watch online on iFILM. Pierre, a young novelist with money and a settled future, walks away from all of it after a stranger turns up claiming to be his half-sister.

He abandons his estate and his fiancée to follow Isabelle — played by Yekaterina Golubeva — into poverty, obsession and a downfall he cannot stop. Carax loosely adapts Herman Melville's novel "Pierre; or, The Ambiguities," and the cryptic title folds in an anagram of the French book title plus a Roman ten, a nod to the script's tenth draft. With Guillaume Depardieu and Catherine Deneuve, it lands as divisive, uncompromising 1990s French arthouse, infamous for a single unsimulated scene. Stream Pola X online on iFILM.