'Megalopolis': the fall of the Coppola empire | Culture

When Francis Ford Coppola landed at the Cannes Festival in 1979, the signs were over his crazy adventure around the Vietnam War pointed to disaster. His wife, Eleanor Coppolaprinted the legend in his 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 about what he had filmed; I didn't know if Apocalypse now It would ultimately become an incomprehensible pompous delirium or a definitive work on the moral decline of his country in the light of that terrible war episode. The bad omens disappeared in that edition of the festival, which the filmmaker also succeeded in doing the second Golden Palm of his career afterward The conversation (1974). ¿The same thing would happen on Thursday with the premiere in that same competition of his last great madness, Megapolis? Would Coppola once again silence the doomsayers who predicted disaster? The answer: no. The project, his great obsession for the past forty years, remains just that: colossal nonsense.

Megapolis is dedicated to his wife, who passed away a few weeks ago. She was the one who wrote after the damned shootings in Vietnam that that experience in the jungle would leave an echo of doom in her husband's later work. His next film after that Apocalypse now, Hunch (1981), filmed entirely at his American Zoetrope studios, plunged him into bankruptcy, further adding to his aura of suicidal brilliance. Let no one be fooled, the problems of Megapolis They are not the ones of the unforgettable Hunch. It was precisely then, in the early 1980s, that Coppola wrote the first draft of his latest adventure, his great fixation of the past decades, the last hurricane cry of a filmmaker who was admired like few others who, at the age of 85, has made an outrageous film in the worst sense of the word.

In two hours and thirteen 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 controlling time. The comparisons with the filmmaker himself seems inevitable: we are confronted with the utopian dream of a visionary creator, “a man from the past who owns the future”, can be heard in this film that cost the filmmaker 120 million dollars, a whim that gave him an important part of the California vineyards in Sonoma Valley.

Coppola has written a script that is as pretentious as it is empty, full of grandiose and overused historical and philosophical quotes. When watching the film, it is impossible not to think of the filmmaker himself talking about himself (the visionary artist who can save a corrupt world with his work?); It's also hard not to root for Adam Driver's character – who With his usual dedication, he does what he can to save himself from shipwreck– a parallel with that of Gary Cooper Spring, King Vidor's 1949 classic, based on the novel by Ayn Rand. That character was inspired by the fervent individualist Howard Roark architect Frank Lloyd Wright, was also a revolutionary, a man who stuck to his beliefs, to his ideal of a new and perfect world. A non-conformist and dark superman who was above all reflective Rand's Objectivist Ideology.

Spring It is a masterpiece of American cinema, characterized by its ideological reading, but cinematically indisputable. Megalopolis, However, things get 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 archive images of Hitler and Mussolini. There's also a Russian satellite and a worthless banker dancing around as the streets of New York succumb to chaos and waste. The architect lives at the top of the Chrysler Building, within the spectacular crown, and at least he should be given that, that jewel of the art deco always shines In the film's opening scene, Adam Driver, like a renaissance King Kong, peers into the city's abyss. at least there Megapolis promised, but even Driver's charm doesn't shine through in the middle of the disaster.

Perhaps the worst surprise is that it is a visually ugly film that forces you to wonder how it could cost so much money with lackluster, even tasteless costumes and sets, and laughable solutions. Coppola suffers from the same excesses that the film itself exposes, which is sometimes grotesque. There is nothing left in the visual pipeline: an incoherent dance of formats and even a disconcerting live sequence that also comes to nothing.

Coppola has been saying this for a long time that the future of cinema could be in the Live cinemaa defense of live cinematographic art that, if reduced to the interaction between stage and screen on display here, will do little to save. Megapolis It also has many references to his own filmography. There's your sister Talia Shire, suggestive The godfather; or Laurence Fishburne, the nervous child of Apocalypse now; or, for those of us who find it The street law (Rumbling fish1983) – and on the back, Rebels (The outsiders1983) – a generation mirror, the plane of a clock suspended in time.

As was logical, Megapolis has arrived in Cannes surrounded by legends and rumors. In 40 years, there's been all kinds of things: frustrated casts, versions, and more versions of the script… But on top of that, apparently serious problems are starting to surface during the filming of the movie these days. There is talk of the director's isolation, of his unorthodox and even incorrect dealings with the team, his lack of patience when confronted with the doubts of some artists, of endless redesigns of the sets… We can relate to most of them to stay. current reading: The history of cinema is full of misunderstood and outrageous men, lonely men who defend a vision that no one understands. Coppola has always been one of them, but this time that excuse won't work: we are very afraid that his big dream has finally become his worst nightmare.

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