The grating bleat of the Artist's complaint with the world is just as noisy and self-involved in Melville's Pierre as in Carax's film version Pola X. So for what it's worth the enfant terrible pretensions of Pola X can be viewed as a faithful interpretation of the material, just as the justifiable retaliatory counter-smirks of filmgoers are anticipated by the brutal reviews Melville's protagonist receives for his own novel-in-progress, and those received by Pierre itself. Neither Melville nor Carax hesitate to poke fun at Pierre from time to time, but both are also sure that the over-the-top universalization of the Artist's inner weather more than amply repays the local discomforts experienced by the reader/fimgoer. Well, maybe. Toward the end of a recent screening of Pola X at Manhattan's Angelika theatre a brief skirmish bubbled up between those in the audience whom the absurdity of Carax's intensely Romantic universe had reduced to helpless giggling and an opposing party of more reverent shushers, led by an Auteurist asswipe who shouted "SHUT UP YOU FUCKING IGNORANT PEASANTS." Most viewers who have any interest in seeing the film to start with will be similarly conflicted, occasionally stunned by vivid sequences of sex , motorcycle crashes, and/or Catherine Deneuve, while being just plain pissed at Carax's apparent "innovation" of magnifying the volume of all sound effects relative to dialogue, so that one is constantly wincing at gunning engines, pen scratchings, industrial avant-garde non-music, etc. And at staples of Frenchitude like all the damn smoking. But there can be no doubt that Pola X is much more palatable than will be its inevitable painful Hollywood remake, in which the crucial foursome of Pierre (Guillaume Depardieu), his kissin' half-sister Isabella (Yekaterina Golubyova), kissin' fiancee (Delphine Chuillot), and kissin' mother (Catherine Deneuve) will likely be played by Ethan Hawke, Angelina Jolie, Renee Zellweger, and Susan Sarandon.