(Cannes) Francis Ford Coppola arrived on Friday, looking frail, with a cane in his hand, at the press conference of Megalopolis. He was accompanied by his son Roman, one of his producers, his sister Talia Shire and his granddaughter Romy (daughter of Sofia and Thomas Mars, singer of the French group Phoenix), who has three lines in the film , presented the day before in competition. A family affair, in short.
Dozens of festival-goers (journalists and professionals) were already waiting for the venerable filmmaker and his main actors, 45 minutes before the scheduled meeting time, with their cell phones brandished in the corridor of the Palais des Festivals which leads to the traditional photo call in the press conference room. In case…
“You didn’t seem to be afraid of anything,” Roman Coppola told his father, speaking of the approximately 120 million US dollars that he invested out of his own pocket in this project that he had cherished for more than 40 years. “There are so many people who die and say to themselves: ‘I wish I had done this and that.’ When I die, I will be able to say that I was able to see my daughter win an Oscar, I was able to make wine and all the films I wanted to make, “replied the filmmaker of The Conversation and D’Apocalypse Nowhis two Palmes d’Or.
Despite the vast majority of very unflattering criticism, and even a few boos heard among the applause at the end of the official premiere (a rarity), the press conference of Megalopolis was a rather embarrassing exercise in obsequiousness for the journalistic profession. Some colleagues have prostrated themselves before the legend of the seventh art, without the slightest embarrassment or the slightest reservation.
We still asked the 85-year-old filmmaker if his film, which is both a fable about the fall of the Roman Empire and the decline of the American empire, should be seen as a critique of the rise of populism. à la Donald Trump (personified in a certain way in Megalopolis by Shia LaBeouf).
“Men like Donald Trump are not in power at the moment,” Francis Coppola said. But there is a trend in the world toward a neoconservative, even fascist, tradition that is scary because anyone who lived through World War II saw horrors and doesn’t want them to happen again. »
Turning to Donald Trump supporter Jon Voight, he added: “Jon, you have different political views,” which made the journalists laugh. “How did you find out about this?” “, Voight replied.
For those wondering, no, Megalopolis will not be the artistic testament of Francis Ford Coppola, even if the end of the film is reminiscent of the Will by Denys Arcand. “I’m already working on a new script. » Hoping it’s better than the last one.
Will, Schrader version
One of the spearheads of the New Hollywood with Francis Coppola and George Lucas – who will receive an honorary Palme next week – Paul Schrader presented Oh, Canada in competition on Friday. Its splendid MishimaPrize for artistic contribution at Cannes in 1985, was produced by Coppola and Lucas… who was initially to direct Apocalypse Now for American Zoetrope, Coppola’s production company. In short, everything is in everything.
PHOTO PROVIDED BY THE CANNES FESTIVAL
Richard Gere and Uma Thurman in Oh, Canada
Paul Schrader, screenwriter for the 1976 Palme d’Or, Taxi Driver by Martin Scorsese, had not presented a film in Cannes competition since Patty Hearst in 1988. Oh, Canadaadaptation of Foregone by the late Russell Banks, including another novel, The Sweet Hereafterwon the Canadian Atom Egoyan the Grand Prix du public at Cannes in 1997, tells the story of a famous Montreal documentarian, Leonard Fife, who before dying delivers a review interview to two of his former students.
Fife (Richard Gere, whom Schrader directed in American Gigolo in 1980) wants his wife and producer of 30 years (Uma Thurman), who is herself one of his former students, to witness his final confidences, while he plunges back into the painful memories of his exile from the United States in 1968.
Is he, as legend has it, a heroic conscientious objector who fled his native country so as not to be sent to the front in Vietnam? Or does he have less noble motives to be forgiven in order to have a clear conscience?
More conventional than Schrader’s most recent critical success, First Reformed (2017), Oh, Canada stars Jacob Elordi (Priscilla by Sofia Coppola) in the role of young Fife, Gere in the role of old Fife (as well as Caroline Dhavernas in the role of his Quebec nurse).
Lulled by the songs of the rock group Phosphorescent, Oh, Canada is an intriguing work that struggles to reach its full potential by failing to avoid awkwardness. Elordi and Gere sometimes share the same role in the same scene, at the same time; the main actors also play their characters 30 years younger. It’s bizarre and unsettling, despite the black and white sequences which soften the features.
There are limits to what we can put down to convention or the vague memories of a dying person who no longer has clear ideas. Oh, Canadaunfortunately, does not keep all its promises.
Lanthimos without lengths… and without laughter
Yorgos Lanthimos won the Golden Lion at the most recent Venice Film Festival thanks to Poor Things, which won Emma Stone the Academy Award for Best Actress. Less than a year later, he teamed up again with the American actress and Willem Dafoe for Kinds of Kindness, presented in competition on Friday. Black comedy, Kinds of Kindness is a sketch film which is divided into three chapters, as many cruel tales, always performed by the same troupe – Margaret Qualley, Jesse Plemons, Hong Chau and Joe Alwyn are added to the cast.
In the first story, a man tries to regain control of his own life, at the mercy of a guru who dictates his behavior from morning to night – from the whiskey he must drink after work to the novel (by Tolstoy) which he must read, including the frequency of his sexual relations and his right to have children. The second chapter tells the story of a paranoid policeman whose wife has disappeared at sea, and the third, the fate of a mother who left her husband and child for a sect, who seeks to find a young woman destined to become a prodigious spiritual leader.
Un certain regard prize in 2010 for the sordid DogtoothJury Prize at Cannes for the hilarious The Lobster (2015) and Screenplay Prize for the disturbing The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017), Yorgos Lanthimos is once again interested with his twisted mind in the notion of dispossession of free will. We find there the usual cynical humor of the filmmaker of The Favoritebut in smaller doses.
For a rare time, I did not find that a Lanthimos film suffered from length (despite a duration of 2 hours 45 minutes), but Kinds of Kindness is less impactful than his most recent proposals. Sketch films are inevitably uneven. The first chapter is more successful than the next two. We are not predicting a Palme d’Or for him, but success with his many admirers, including myself.
The hosting costs for this report were paid by the Cannes Film Festival, which had no say in the matter.