The week’s cinema releases with Thierry Fiorile and Matteu Maestracci: “Megalopolis” by Francis Ford Coppola and “Riverboom” by Claude Baechtold.
Published
Reading time: 7 min
With Megalopolis, American director Francis Ford Coppola, 85 years old, can finally present to spectators his summation film, a project that he has been carrying around for around forty years.
We are in a fictional city, a New York mixed with ancient Rome, in a period of history that is itself undefined, but which is undoubtedly our present or a near future. The main character is César Catilina, Adam Driver, artist and architect of genius, with the power to stop time, he opposes the conservative mayor, Frankyn Cicero, on how their city and its city should transform and evolve. habitat.
To make matters worse, the mayor’s daughter, Julia, is in love with Caesar, and at their side we find a Machiavellian bimbo from TV, or the billionaire Hamilton Crassus III and his misguided and corrupting nephew. It’s visually charged, it goes a thousand miles an hour, it sometimes speaks in Latin, both modern and old-fashioned, eco-friendly and decadent, as if a Coppola conscious of his own mortality had wanted to put aside all his obsessions and inspirations in a giant, psychedelic shaker.
Contrary to what one might think, the filmmaker is not bitter, he believes, like his film, that we are at a pivotal moment in humanity, and that things are reinventing themselves. Difficult to remain neutral in the face of this Megalopolis from which we do not emerge unscathed, it is often brilliant, sometimes naive or pontificating. There is something deeply touching about what Coppola does, including the film’s flaws.
This is a documentary that should never have been released given that the tapes disappeared for 20 years… A story of very nice nickel-plated feet, in 2002, when the American army invaded Afghanistan, Serge Michel, Swiss journalist, asks Claude Baechtold, who has nothing better to do, to accompany him to Kabul, where Paolo Woods, an Italian photographer, is waiting for them.
And off we go for a long car ride, in a country where the rout of the Taliban has given way to unpredictable warlords. War journalism in ‘byways’ mode, where the small story tells the big story.
In this crazy travelogue there are astonishing images of Afghanistan, before the sinister return of the Taliban to power, but above all the birth of a beautiful friendship which still lasts today.