The title Pola X has nothing discernible to do with the film. But most work from the eclectic hand of its director/co-writer Léos Carax is a medley of styles, settings, moods, music and, if any, themes. On the surface arranged about a search for identity, maturity and incontestable truth, the two-and-a-quarter hours turns out instead a black-humor descent into death, despair and pessimism.

The tale takes it core from Herman Melville’s Pierre; or, The Ambiguities, which, on the heels of Moby-Dick, lost the author his earlier wide readership. Like the former, 1852 novel, this 1999-set film will lose many who approach it while engrossing some few. Carax’ recent, controversial Holy Motors relied on its very story of one man’s disguises and persona-shifting to relate unlike episodes, but this earlier film glories in unapologetic, unexplained and almost unrelated parts and characters.

Such differences are exemplified, for example, in an opening section of impressive Normandy chateaux, manicured gardens, woods and gracious living, starkly contrasted to a sudden transformation into a dissonant orchestra playing in a revolutionary commune in an abandoned industrial warehouse-factory on the Paris Seine bankside. Just as disparate is Pierre himself (Guillaume Depardieu), slender femininely beautiful to start and sloppy, stouter, scraggy-bearded and –haired to finish. Shirtless, the boyish idealistic bestselling writer had composed on a computer; in fingerless gloves and bundled up, the grubby driven man handwrites in red felt-tip. His final limp and cane may be an incorporation of the real-life amputation of an infected leg of Gérard’s ill-fated actor son.

Ambiguity and incest run from the opening. On his late diplomat father’s motorcycle, Pierre goes to the mansion and morning bed of childlike fiancée Lucie (Delphine Chuillot). Home at the family estate that he is to inherit, he is coddled and cuddled like a lover by widowed mother Marie (Catherine Deneuve). Unidentified behind the nom de plume Aladin, he has scored enormous youth cult success with first novel In the Light and is writing a second, which will be soon be scrapped at the onset of an obsession with absolute truth.

SPOILER ALERT

Lucie insists there be no secrets between them and thus is upset by his hidden, recurrent dream of a dark woman. Over an anxious beer, his recently returned cousin Thibault (Laurent Lucas) notes that very woman spying on them, and in the woods at night Pierre encounters her and hears her heavily accented life story. Claiming to be his half-sister, Isabelle (Yekaterina Golubeva) is gypsy dark, unlike him and his blonde mother and bride-to-be, and accompanied by diminutive gypsy-dark Petruta (Petruta Catana) and a backward girl-child smacking of Romania. He believes Isabelle, insists that she has “freed” him, and abruptly leaves Rouen for Paris with this new sibling and her two companions in tow.

There intervene a taxi driver’s racist insults, racist hotel refusals, a cheap immigrant arrondissement pension, and a tragedy, before they move to the dog- and armed guards-patrolled commune, where Pierre and Isabelle become secret incestuous lovers, ill Lucie shows up as voluntary “sacrifice” and moves in, and treacherous Thibault resurfaces in pursuit of her.

Countryside greens and autumnal yellow-browns have long given way to steel-grey wintry Paris, as the plot, too, veers darker towards inevitable tragedy.

As one expects from this filmmaker, Pola X is offbeat in the extreme. Less visually erotic or bloody than the other nine in the Museum of Arts and Design/MAD’s current “J’Adore Violence: Cinema of the New French Extremity,” it is as daring and at least as distressing in its psychology as any of them.

(Released by Winestar Cinema; not rated by MPAA.)