[CINÉMA] Megalopolis, decline of America or decline of Coppola?

From Twixtin 2011, Francis Ford Coppola has no longer achieved anything. And it’s an understatement to say that the film disappointed the public, like a significant portion of the critics. Also, when this major New Hollywood filmmaker announced that he was directing a project that had been close to his heart for forty years, and whose beginnings date back to the filming ofApocalypse Now in 1979 (!), our curiosity was piqued. Was Coppola finally going to get back on track after two pitiful decades? We wanted to believe it, especially since the filmmaker put his skin on the table by financing the $120 million budget out of his own pocket. To do this, he would have sold part of his vineyard. And then we would have appreciated that this project dedicated to his wife Eleanor Coppola, recently deceased, was a masterpiece. Alas, that’s not the case…

Syncretically associating contemporary America with the Roman Empire, the scenario imagines the decline of the city of New Rome – thought of as a rewriting of New York – then in full moral, economic and political decadence. In this sad picture which evokes the Late Empire and promises us an inevitable collapse, two men oppose each other: Franklyn Cicero, mayor of the city, conservative and supporter of the status quo, and César Catilina, artist-urban planner of genius who never swears only through progress and creative audacity… Torn between the two, the mayor’s daughter, Julia Cicero, could well be the key to a compromise.

An accumulation of stereotypes

If the desire to establish a parallel between the decline of America and that of Rome is attractive on paper – how can we not think of the writings of David Engels, who compares the European Union to Rome? –, the imaging seems very laborious. Firefighter, kitsch, Coppola strings together like pearls all the possible clichés about the Roman Empire: the Saturnalia, the debauchery – entirely Fellinian – of the Late Empire with its women of easy virtue lying on their chaise lounges, the effeminate and made-up intriguers, the games of the Colosseum, and the people – inevitably stupid – who delight in them. Populophobic to death, falsely erudite, Coppola believes himself above the rest, seeks to make us admire the above-ground elites that he portrays and considers it wise to further thicken the sauce by adding Shakespeare to the references invoked: the sempiternal “To be or not to be” that any artist of good taste should refrain from quoting all the time, Hamlet’s monologue is so worn out…

Progressivism, a shield against decline?

Posier as ever, not very subtle in his approach, Coppola gives birth to a shaky work, visually garish (it looks like an ad for perfume), where most of the sequences drag on, are interchangeable or devoid of narrative interest. As for the general statement, which smugly praises the ideology of progress and scorns or ridicules populist leaders while pretending not to see that progressivism has precisely led us to the decline that the filmmaker deplores, it has rarely been so false, Manichean and politically correct – Coppola is indeed a man of his sociology… The character understands nothing about his time and clearly no longer has much to say.

1 star out of 5

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