He's back: Leos Carax (unravel the anagram in his name, and you get 'Alex Oscar'), alias Alexandre Dupont. Listed not too long ago in Cahiers du Cinéma as one of the 'golden boys' of the 1980s, together with Jean-Jacques Beineix and Luc Besson, his credits before Pola X show only three features and three shorts over the past 20 years - not much even for a proven talent who always talked a good game and had something to show for it. But throw Catherine Deneuve and Guillaume Depardieu into the equation and it all adds up to a hot ticket and an overflow crowd at the Palais on the big Ascension Thursday holiday.

It's rather symptomatic that when speaking about Carax, both critics and friends find it difficult to separate the man from the films he made about himself. For here was an unknown film-maker, with just two shorts to his credit - the uncompleted La Fille Revée (or La Fille Aimée, as it's sometimes listed, 1978) and the 17-minute Strangulation Blues (1980), a notch above a music video - who burst upon the international scene at the age of 23 with Boy Meets Girl (1983), a low-budget black-and-white

feature that follows a lonely Alex (Denis Levant, Alexandre Dupont's alter ego) through the Paris streets at night where he meets the elusive and beautiful Mireille Perrier.

A tip of the hat to Breathless and Jean-Luc Godard? Possibly, for Carax popped up later in Godard's King Lear in one of his extra-curricular acting appearances. And his next feature film, Mauvais Sang (Bad Blood, aka The Night Is Young, 1986), a futuristic thriller with Denis Levant again as Alex, has often been compared unfairly to Godard's Alphaville. In reality, it's a more sensual modification of the same theme as Boy Meets Girl - love and the tender ways to express it - but now being reworked in a different context, and this time with Juliette Binoche as the object of his desire.

Levant and Binoche were back in the third film of the 'Alex trilogy': Les Amants Du Pont Neuf (The Lovers Of Pont Neuf, 1990). Much has been written about the nebulous reasons for backing this cause célèbre, which took three years to make and went nowhere at the box office, and it would be pointless to rehash them here. But when Carax was asked recently in an interview whether he had ever thought of giving up cinema after Les Amants, the answer (as usual) was right to the point: "You can take planes and trains and boats, you can go to hell… but one day, if you're still alive, God willing, you come back to yourself. Why do you make films? Because often there's no one left to talk to. The link to another is gone."

Pola X, Carax's fourth feature film and a selection to compete at Cannes after the director's eight-year absence from film-making, was inspired by Herman Melville's novel, Pierre, or The Ambiguities, published in 1852, from which it is loosely adapted. Set in Normandy during three seasons - summer, autumn and winter - it focuses on a tragic love triangle between a writer, Pierre (Depardieu), who's struggling to write a new novel; Isabelle (Katerina Golubeva), who appears out of nowhere and claims to be his sister; and Lucie (Delphine Chuillot), the woman Pierre intends to marry but soon forgets. If Golubeva looks familiar, then you probably remember her from one of Carax's favourite films: Sharunas Bartas' Few Of Us, a Lithuanian-French-German-Portuguese co-production set in the wilds of Central Asia, in which Golubeva played the lead role. And if you look closely, you'll also see Sharunas Bartas in a cameo.

Precisely where he goes from here is a mystery, as usual. But, like Orson Welles, Sergio Leone, and Werner Herzog - directors with a penchant for excessive expression on and off the screen - Carax will always be a pleasure to follow. Ron Holloway