Climbing a mountain path, I started to think. If you work by reason, you grow harsh. If you dip your oar into emotion, you are swept away. If you insist on having your own way, you are constrained. At all events, this world of ours is a difficult place to live. When the difficulty intensifies, you want to move to some place where living is easier. When you realize that living will be no easier wherever you move, then a poem is born and a painting comes into being.

It was no god or demon that created this world of ours. It was made by the people who live in it—you, I, and the neighbors who pass by. If the world created by these ordinary people is a difficult place to live, there is nowhere else to move to. If there is anywhere, it must be the world of the nonhuman, and that is bound to be even more unpleasant than the human world. Since there is no escape from this world, your only choice if you find it a difficult place is to accommodate yourself to it, and to make life’s brief transient moments as beautiful and pleasant as possible, even if only for a short while. Herein lies the poet’s mission, the painter’s calling. Every practitioner of the arts is precious because they soothe the human world and enrich people’s hearts.

Natsume, Sōseki. Kusamakura. 1906.
Translated by Meredith McKinney, Penguin Books, 2008.

Early in the film, Pierre has it all—youth, beauty, wealth, and a perfect fiancée. In a garden drenched in golden light, his mother, Marie, whispers her blind devotion: “You are so beautiful today.” He smiles, turning it into a game: “What if I were ugly?”

Right then, his world feels flawless. Yet, beneath the playful surface, a quiet anxiety bleeds through. It is a cruel, innocent question born from absolute safety: Is this happiness real? If the beauty fades, will the love remain?

In POLA X, this question cuts far deeper than skin. It probes the dark spaces of existence. Here, “ugliness” unravels in three distinct layers, spanning from the physical loss of a pretty face and the internal rot of the ego’s hidden cruelties, to the ultimate existential shadow stained by social taboos that the polite world refuses to see.

Borrowing from Melville’s original subtitle, The Ambiguities, the film watches pure ideals collapse into beautiful destruction. It asks a relentless question: Is love just a beautiful illusion we invent, or can it survive the truth?

In this light, his question becomes a naked confession: “Can you love me when the mask is off? When you see my deepest dark?” This perspective moves past aesthetics into the raw marrow of human existence. It offers a stunning, natural reading of the film—a reminder that to love someone completely is to look directly into their shadow.