“Megalopolis”: the new Coppola masterpiece?

The gesture was already unique on paper. Good news: it is also unique on screen. The most eagerly awaited film of the Competition (and probably of the year), Megalopolis does not disappoint. Well, maybe it does: it will certainly disappoint those who would like to see a new Apocalypse Now (which, at the time, had disappointed those expecting a new Godfather); but those who love the Coppola of One from the Heart, Rusty James or Youth without Youth – in other words, those who don’t expect a new polished masterpiece from the most punk of New Hollywood filmmakers but rather some new sense of his perpetual avant-gardism will be delighted.

Anyone who has followed the story of the film and its making since it was launched in 2019 will know what kind of madness it is. In a nutshell: Coppola spent one hundred and twenty million of his own dollars (earned by the sweat of his Californian vines), to finally realize this project he’d been dreaming of since the late 1970s, and for which he reportedly rewrote the script over three hundred times during the decades of maturation. The press gleefully reported rumors about the unorthodox shooting conditions. Good old Francis tended to lock himself away for hours in his HQ (the famous « Silver Fish », a supposedly ultra-technological combo he invented in the early eighties) to smoke joints, before arriving on set with a thousand contradictory ideas implemented as best as possible by a dubious crew… It’s all very ordinary, then, for the last of the romantics to pen a fable about the fall of the Roman Republic transposed to a futuristic New York in the throes of « hypernormalization » (to paraphrase English documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis, whom Coppola, we’re willing to bet, had in mind here).

Megalopolis features the opposition between the mayor of this New Rome, Francis Cicero – Giancarlo Esposito, often seen with Spike Lee and in Breaking Bad, here as sober as he is charismatic – and a utopian urban planner à la Le Corbusier or with, Howard Roark, the hero of Ayn Rand, adapted in 1949 by King Vidor, named Caesar Catilina – Adam Driver, all restrained fever and contracted jaw. The former manages while the latter dreams. And through these two characters quoting Marcus Aurelius or Ralph Waldo Emerson at every turn – the film breaks the record, probably set by Godard, for literary quotations in a feature film – when they’re not plotting for control of the fragile res publica, it’s of course his own schizophrenic soul that Coppola shows us. He, the family man and shrewd businessman, versus the visionary and uncompromising artist; the man brilliant enough to set up a revolutionary studio in 1980 (Zoetrope) and perverted enough to sink it two years later, on a roll of the dice (or rather of the heart) that would put him in debt for twenty-five years.

Megalopolis tells this story of a life, a family and an art form with a sincerity, even a disarming naiveté, that only an ageless old man with nothing left to prove can bring to the table. Falling back on his eighties aesthetic at full speed – which also implies, alas, a rather caricatured vision of women, either fatal (Aubrey Plaza, fortunately irresistible in the role of a long-toothed journalist) or muse-like (Nathalie Emmanuel, a tabloid starlet who becomes Catilina’s ideal wife) – Coppola recreates the game, in the age of digital imagery that he helped invent, but which we feel has now overtaken him. Yet it’s precisely in this retro-futurist loophole that he creates the most insane images we’ll see on screen this year, holding time by its two ends, past and future, to materialize a utopian present before our bemused eyes. Even if it means throwing narrative propriety to the wind, as did Southland Tales (2006), that other radically messy, catch-all film in which Richard Kelly settled his score with the Bush years. And at a time when the nightmare of Trump (embodied here by Shia Labeouf, more Labeoufian than ever) is resurfacing, Megalopolis comes at the right time politically. Out of time and very much of its time: the hallmark of great films.



Source link : https://www.lesinrocks.com/cinema/megalopolis-the-new-coppola-masterpiece-618496-16-05-2024/

Author : Jacky Goldberg

Publish date : 2024-05-16 19:30:00

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