Megalopolis: Coppola’s Ambitious Film at Cannes 2024 | Review

MOVIE REVIEWS

Cannes 2024

Are there ghosts that should remain as such?

The most anticipated film of the year does not disappoint, or perhaps only slightly disappoints those who expected a new Apocalypse Now, which in turn disappointed those who expected a new The Godfather. Those who love the perpetually avant-garde Coppola, who seeks to exhaust cinema and reach the end of all its possibilities, are decidedly satisfied. For forty years, Francis Ford Coppola has nurtured an obsession, cultivated it, sparked it, matured it in barrels, and always postponed it. An immense project for which he mortgaged a part of his wine estate, throwing himself body and soul into what he believed in, without finding a studio that believed in him. A superb gesture by an old passionate magnate or an eternally debuting megalomaniac, Megalopolis resembles Balzac’s “unknown masterpiece”: a painting that, by being repeatedly painted, repainted, reconsidered, retouched, and corrected, ends up losing all coherence. We spectators observe the confusedly settled colors and a multitude of bizarre lines, until we discover in a corner of the canvas the disconcerting beauty of a fragment that escaped that incredible, slow, and progressive destruction.

The last of the romantics surfs under the bombs and invents a kiss at the vertiginous heights of Harold Lloyd’s comic world. Megalopolis is never as moving as when we recognize Coppola behind his characters. In the dizzying opening, his protagonist discovers the power to stop time, then loses and finds it again by falling in love. Coppola’s great Icarus is a fable engraved on a marble caption. In a decadent future, New Rome, similar to New York but vaguely futuristic, sinks into despair, and the patricians struggle for power. The film contrasts two men and two opposing visions of the future: a visionary and idealistic architect, Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver, always Caraxian and of rare plasticity), inventor of a building material with miraculous molecular properties, and Frank Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), a conservative mayor who supports a reconstruction of cement and corruption. The first governs, the second dreams of an eco-responsible and high-tech New Rome. Between them is Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel), Cesar’s lover and Cicero’s daughter.

Megalopolis disarmingly naively tells the story of a life, a family, and an art form that only an ageless old man with nothing left to prove could set up. Immersed in an ’80s aesthetic, the film’s obsession is time, suspended atop the Chrysler Building, a perfect compass measuring the city and creating images and hyperboles, ellipses and parabolas. A pompous work or baroque farce, we could summarize Megalopolis‘ failure in lapidary formulas, but we prefer to focus on the brilliant idea of a live happening that takes us back to the fairground origins of cinema: a ‘cinema worker’ literally sits in front of the screen with a microphone in hand to dialogue with the images. It’s hard not to share Coppola’s Bergsonian ambition, his undiminished desire to experiment, to push boundaries, to hybridize genres, tones, and forms, with unwavering faith in an art over which he has visibly lost control. Between Marcus Aurelius and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Megalopolis is free and kamikaze, out of time and within its time like every great film, a bridge between ancient Rome and the New York of a near future, where Trump’s nightmare emerges, with a Shia LaBeouf more LaBeoufian than ever.

The rational architecture of Megalopolis supports a second layer, a bizarre and composite body, a Frankenstein creature, an orgy where SF, satirical comedy, fantasy, and peplum feast. Pedantic digressions alternate with vibrant soliloquies on the future of humanity, prosaicness plays hide and seek with nobility, grotesque with monumental. Coppola makes the statues move, ‘sings’ Puccini, shamelessly quotes himself, inserts dialogues in Latin, films time marching towards death and longing to stop it, breaks the boundaries with the screen… It’s almost impossible to anticipate the twists of this Coppolian fantasy; Megalopolis is (really) everything. Producer, screenwriter, and director, the emperor does not obey any rules and runs like a child after his passions: ancient culture, philosophy, politics, opera, art, new technologies, time, architecture, family.

In this dreamy and suicidal whirlwind, Coppola risks everything and declares his faith in the future of America and cinema, punctuating his film with splendid images, transitions of dazzling lights and water movements, dissolves, and superimpositions that blend contemporary architecture with ancient buildings. A disconcerting and unclassifiable object, when it’s not conspiring for the control of the republic, it has the merit of showing the schizophrenic soul of its demiurge: the pater familias and the shrewd businessman, the visionary artist and the brilliant entrepreneur who founds a revolutionary studio and then sinks it with a roll of the dice (and heart). Thumbs up for the audacity of the gesture and the formal flashes of this golden and ebony epic that speaks all the languages of cinema without giving time for the situations to resemble completed scenes. Whether you dream of what Megalopolis could have been or want to forget what it is, Coppola has made a film that has done everything to exist and begs us to do the same to love it.

Marzia Gandolfi

Cinematografo, May 17, 2024