AFTER SENDING out Moby-Dick to his publisher, Herman Melville sat back and waited to count his profits. Instead, the book died aborning, and Melville, none the richer for all his labor, hunkered down, stewed about the gross unfairness of it all, and released unto the world Pierre, or the Ambiguities, a bitterly sarcastic rumination on literary fame and the same insane hunting down of God that had animated his previous work.

It may well be this sense of unjust persecution that drew director Leos Carax to adapt Pierre. Forbidden to make a movie since the "extravagance" of his 1991 feature Lovers on the Bridge (which cost $28 million, or a pittance more than Harrison Ford is getting to play a sub commander in his upcoming K-19; truly, Hollywood and Paris, though both movie towns, rely on two different standards of excessiveness), Carax has returned with an adaptation of Pierre, and the standard critical line has been that France's "bad boy" director has grown up--that his former extremes are here toned down to acceptable, audience-friendly levels.

Don't buy it for a second; If Pola X lacks the visual exuberance of Carax's three previous features, it shares with them the relentless focus on obsessive love. Only here, what had previously been expressed in delirious, ecstatic explosions of pure cinema is restrained to a simmering sense of potentiality. If his other films were all about the headlong rush of sensation, Pola X instead envelops itself in a muted, erotic daze.

Precisely the state young Pierre (Guillaume Depardieu, just as physical, though less poetic, than Carax regular Denis Lavant), wealthy son of a dead diplomat and a beautiful mother (Catherine Deneuve), who insists he call her "sister," finds himself when his life of empty privilege is upset by the revelation that, unbeknownst to him, a half-sister of his has been wandering the world as long as he has been alive. Confronted with this fact, Pierre abandons his engagement to the lovely Lucie (Delphine Chuillot), casts off his life of comfort, and hustles himself and newfound sibling Isabelle (Kathleen Golubeva) off to Paris to make a living from the one thing Pierre thinks he does well: writing novels. But his assessment of his own talent is rather higher than that of others, and soon Pierre and Isabelle find themselves miserable, destitute, and shacking up with a scraggly group of revolutionaries who have occupied a warehouse.

It is a sign of Carax's sincere attempt to bring a classical tone to this story ("The book is full of irony, but I'm not gifted for that," the director told The New York Times) that its conflict is played out as a battle between light and darkness. Lucie, blond and ethereal, living in a blue-painted room adorned with adorable paintings of children, belongs to the same world as Pierre's expansive mansion: an airy, bright fortress where the music of Purcell (that most beloved composer of English courts) burbles on in merry contentment. Whereas, dark-haired, raven-eyed Isabelle consistently lures Pierre into the night, making him chase her into a shadowed woods or hunt for her in the black recesses of a train tunnel. (Much has been made of the film's title referring to the French translation of Melville's novel, with the "X" signifying Carax's 10th draft; I doubt he missed the pun on "polar.") Both worlds are lies (when the two ladies come to join him in his squalor, Pierre passes off his sister as his wife, his former lover as his cousin), but to Pierre they represent a battle between two would-be truths.

Between these extremes, the purely sensual Pierre tries to make his stand. I can think of few films more deliriously tactile than this, more acutely aware of the heated immediacy of flesh rubbing against flesh. Pierre is forever touching others to find himself: exchanging what are almost lover's caresses with his mother, rubbing up against the head of his beloved cousin to assure himself of a bond that, as it turns out, does not exist. This reaches its fulfillment in Carax's boldest and most successful move, the passionate, sexually explicit scene where Pierre and Isabelle make love. Devoid of music, or of any sound save for terrified, expectant breathing and gasps of ecstasy, filmed so dimly that you're never quite sure you are seeing what in fact you are seeing, the scene transcends its own hardcore frankness by leading you away from identification with the protagonists into rhapsodic thoughts of embracing your own lover. Carax remains the great poet of cinematic love, and Pola X is his finest testament to date.