When Francis Ford Coppola landed at the Cannes festival in 1979, the omens about his crazy adventure around the Vietnam War pointed to disaster. His wife, Eleanor Coppola, printed the legend in her film diary, published that same year, and in the subsequent documentary Heart of Darkness, a Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, 1991). During that painful process, the filmmaker openly showed his panic at what he had filmed; he didn’t know if Apocalypse Now It would end up being an incomprehensible pompous delirium or a definitive work about the moral ruin of his country in the face of that terrible war episode. The bad omens dissipated in that edition of the festival, where, in addition, the filmmaker won the second Palme d’Or of his career after The conversation (1974). Would the same thing happen this Thursday with the premiere in that same contest of his latest great madness, Megalopolis? Would Coppola silence again the doomsayers who were predicting a disaster? The answer: no. The project, his great obsession of the last 40 years, remains just that, a colossal nonsense.
Megalopolis It is dedicated to his wife, who died a few weeks ago. She was the one who, after the cursed filming in Vietnam, wrote that that experience in the jungle would leave an echo of doom in the subsequent work of her husband. Her next movie after Apocalypse Now, Hunch (1981), filmed entirely at his American Zoetrope studios, plunged him into bankruptcy, further magnifying his aura of suicidal genius. Let no one be fooled, the problems of Megalopolis They are not those of the unforgettable Hunch. It was precisely then, at the beginning of the eighties, when Coppola wrote the first version of his last adventure, his great fixation of the last decades, the last hurricane cry of a filmmaker admired like few others who, at 85 years old, has created a film delusional in the worst sense of the word.
In its two hours and 13 minutes, Coppola unfolds a story that equates the present with the fall of the Roman Empire through a central character, the architect Caesar Catalina (Adam Driver), obsessed with mastering time. Comparisons with the filmmaker himself seem inevitable: we are faced with the utopian dream of a visionary creator, “a man from the past possessed of the future,” is heard in this film that has cost the filmmaker 120 million dollars, a whim that can cause them to lose an important part of their Californian vineyards in Sonoma Valley.
Coppola has written a script as pretentious as it is empty, full of grandiose and overused historical and philosophical quotes. Watching the film it is impossible not to think of the filmmaker himself talking about himself (the visionary artist capable of saving a corrupt world with his work?); It is also difficult not to find in the character of Adam Driver – who with his usual dedication does what he can to save himself from the shipwreck – a parallel with that of Gary Cooper in The spring, King Vidor’s 1949 classic based on Ayn Rand’s novel. That character, the staunch individualist Howard Roark, inspired by the architect Frank Lloyd Wright, was also a revolutionary, a man clinging to his convictions, to his ideal of a new and perfect world. A nonconformist and dark superman who, above all, reflected Rand’s objectivist ideology.
The spring It is a masterpiece of American cinema, marked by its ideological reading, but incontestable cinematically. Megalopolis, However, it falls out of hand, even in its naivety – not to say hollow and self-indulgent – political reading: in one hallucinatory, and confusing moment, the Statue of Liberty will be measured against archival images of Hitler and Mussolini. There’s also a Russian satellite dancing around and a lousy banker as the streets of New York succumb to chaos and waste. The architect lives at the top of the Chrysler Building, within its spectacular crown, and, at least that much must be granted to him, that jewel of the art deco always shines In the film’s first sequence, Adam Driver, like a neo-construction King Kong, peers into the abyss of the city. at least there Megalopolis promised, but not even Driver’s charm emerges in the middle of the shipwreck.
Perhaps the worst surprise is that it is a visually ugly film that forces you to wonder how it could have cost so much money with dingy, even tacky, costumes and sets, and laughable solutions. Coppola suffers from the same excesses that the film itself denounces, which at times is grotesque. Nothing is left in the visual pipeline: a disjointed dance of formats and even a disconcerting live sequence that, on top of that, comes to nothing.
Coppola has long been proclaiming that the future of cinema could lie in Live Cinemaa defense of live cinematographic art that if reduced to the stage-screen interaction seen here, will do little to save. Megalopolis It also has many references to its own filmography. There is her sister, Talia Shire, evoking The Godfather; or Laurence Fishburne, the nervous child of Apocalypse Now; or, for those of us who find in The street law (Rumble Fish1983) —and on its reverse, Rebels (The Outsiders1983) — a generational mirror, the plane of a clock suspended in time.
As was logical, Megalopolis has arrived at Cannes surrounded by legend and rumors. In 40 years there has been everything: frustrated casts, versions and more versions of the script… But, in addition, in these days, apparently serious problems have begun to be uncovered during the filming of the film. There is talk of the director’s isolation, of his unorthodox, even incorrect, ways with the team, his lack of patience when faced with the doubts of some of the performers, of endless redesigns of the sets… We can stay with the most topical reading: The history of cinema is full of misunderstood and excessive men, solitary men who defend a vision that no one understands. Coppola has always been one of them, but this time he won’t have that excuse: we are very afraid that his great dream has ended up becoming his worst nightmare.
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