La Presse at the 77th Cannes Film Festival | Megalopolis: a Roman chariot accident

(Cannes) A ​​Roman chariot accident. If I had to summarize Francis Ford Coppola’s new film in one image, Megalopolispresented Thursday in competition at 77^e Cannes Film Festival, that would be it.

The shipwreck is titanic. The American cinema giant, 85 years old, wanted to carry out this heartfelt project since the filming ofApocalypse Now, which earned him his second Palme d’Or 45 years ago. At the time, Coppola had invested all his savings in endless filming in the Philippines. This time, he mortgaged part of his vineyard and invested some 120 million US dollars from his personal fortune.

Let’s get straight to it: the money doesn’t appear on the screen. The demonstration scenes look like they were shot with two dozen extras and the budget of a Quebec soap opera. Also, special effects may have been cutting edge 10 years ago, but that’s not the case anymore. In short, we wonder where all the millions have disappeared.

Fable about the destiny of the United States at the dawn of a new presidential campaign by Donald Trump, a strong metaphor for the fall of the Roman Empire, Francis Coppola’s Megalopolis is set in a futuristic megalopolis, New Rome, which looks exactly like New York in 2024. Both a science fiction peplum and a political dystopia, the first film from the filmmaker of Godfather Since Twixt in 2011 stars Adam Driver as a brilliant architect named César Catilina.

Winner of a Nobel Prize thanks to his invention of megalon, a revolutionary material, Caesar talks a lot, drinks even more in his apartment at the top of the Chrysler Building and seems to confuse himself in his muddy aphorisms.

His mistress (Aubrey Plaza) is an archetypal diamond digger, his uncle (Jon Voigt), an easily influenced billionaire, his cousin (Shia LaBeouf) is morbidly jealous, his mother (Talia Shire, the filmmaker’s sister) is angry with him, Mayor of New Rome, named Francis Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), hates him, and the mayor’s daughter, jet-setter Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel) intrigues him. I can’t say exactly what roles Dustin Hoffman and Jason Schwartzman, Coppola’s nephew, have in this mush of the future: they are essentially extras.

I almost forgot: Caesar has the power to suspend time with a snap of his fingers. Not that it’s of any help to the plot…

“Our American Republic is no different from ancient Rome. Will we fall like Rome because of the insatiable appetite of a few men? », asks from the outset, in voiceover, the character of Caesar’s faithful right arm (Laurence Fishburne, who was only 14 years old at the time of filmingApocalypse Now).

Is Mayor Cicero motivated by the common good or corrupt? Is Caesar a megalomaniacal pygmalion, as the mayor describes him, or a utopian who wants better living conditions for his fellow citizens? Coppola’s headless scenario, which seems to change direction with the wind, provides no clear answer.

Cartoon treatment

Megalopolis is a cold, cerebral, wobbly 2:18 style exercise that feels like a party of puffy toga, with its incessant and insistent nods to Roman mythology: the shadow of Remus and Romulus on a wall, chariot races and gladiators (WWE type wrestlers) at the Coliseum at Madison Square Garden (the Colosseum), circus artists like in Fellini’s films, etc.

There are of course bacchanals, where young people – especially women – wallow in stupor, lust, hallucinogens, techno music or syrupy jazz saxophone melodies. We are far from what Gene Hackman played with this instrument in The ConversationCoppola’s first Palme d’Or in 1974, and the debauchery is neither that ofEyes Wide Shut by Stanley Kubrick nor that of Babylon by Damien Chazelle, but a very watered down version.

The cartoonish treatment of the staging is closer to the superhero film in style. Batman by Tim Burton, by Dick Tracy by Warren Beatty or a filmed theater production on Broadway. The characters are also sketched in such a caricatured way that it is difficult to become attached to them.

Above all, Francis Coppola poorly exploits today’s technological means in the service of a vision of another era. It’s not a question of age: his friend Martin Scorsese has remained as relevant as ever.

His confused film, without clear direction, is still without a distributor for North America, even though IMAX committed Thursday to showing it in its theaters. His fate, as a journalist from the magazine reminded me yesterday Variety, the Hollywood bible, will probably depend on its reception in Cannes. Let’s say that the chances of Coppola paying his way are almost zero.

However, he wanted to Megalopolis be presented in competition, recalled the general delegate of the Cannes Festival, Thierry Frémaux, at a press conference on Monday. The Cannes competition is a double-edged sword, which can make or break a work in a snap of the fingers, precisely. Coppola had not presented a film there since the coronation ofApocalypse Nowwhose catastrophic shooting was immortalized by his late wife Eleanor, in the fascinating documentary Hearts of Darkness.

Information revealed about the filming of Megalopolis also evoke that ofApocalypse Nowwhich began with the dismissal of its main actor Harvey Keitel, before the heart attack of the man who replaced him, Martin Sheen, and the million dollars per week demanded by Marlon Brando, who did not know his lines.

According to the British daily The GuardianCoppola allegedly tried during the filming of Megalopolis to kiss extras during a decadent party scene because he wanted to put them in the atmosphere of the evenings at the legendary Studio 54 in New York. The filmmaker reportedly spent entire days in his dressing room smoking jar while we hoped for his arrival on the set. And that’s not to mention that half of the visual effects team (who were frankly unsuccessful) was fired in the middle of filming.

Francis Ford Coppola’s cinematic testament, dedicated to Eleanor, who died a few weeks ago, is a grotesque farce, which we hope is intentional. A critique of grandiloquence which is itself grandiloquent. A film that wants to be epic, but which is terribly kitsch and new-age, both in form and content.

There are scenes of Megalopolis which made me think of the soap opera pastiche The heart has its reasons by Marc Brunet, with Marc Labrèche and his band. I laughed out loud, but not because it was supposed to be funny. I can only hope – Coppola being a monument of the seventh art whose work is fundamental to my cinephilia – that this film becomes a psychotronic cult success.

I wonder what the jury chaired by Greta Gerwig will think, whose one of the best jokes in the film barbie was about men’s obsession with The Godfather. There are only two filmmakers in this competition who have already won the Palme d’Or: Jacques Audiard and Coppola. On May 25, the American could become the first triple Palmé d’Or winner in history. I wouldn’t hold my breath if I were him.

“There is nothing more terrible than a pretentious film,” Coppola declared in Hearts of Darkness. A film that aspires to something great and fails to achieve it. This is shit! ” This is not me saying it.

The hosting costs for this report were paid by the Cannes Film Festival, which had no say in the matter.