At 85, the filmmaker who won two awards for “Secret Conversation” and “Apocalypse Now” Francis Ford Coppola returns with “Megalopolis”, thirteen years after “Twixt”. Self-produced, this futuristic parable with colossal ambitions released on September 25 oscillates between the sublime and the grotesque.
It’s an understatement to say that we awaited Coppola’s latest film, rightly or wrongly announced as his testamentary film, with a mixture of excitement and apprehension. A colossal fresco worth nearly 120 million dollars that the filmmaker dreamed of for decades before producing it with his own funds. The result, designated as a fable, clearly benefits from being seen as a farce. And that said without any sarcasm.
It is therefore in New Rome, a futuristic version of New York mixed with ancient references, that this dystopian and decadent story takes place. There, Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver), a visionary architect who discovered a material supposed to be indestructible and eternal, opposes Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), the conservative mayor of the city, to rebuild the city on more sustainable foundations. For her part, the mayor’s daughter, Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel), a seemingly superficial jet-setter, falls in love with Cesar who distracts her from her father’s retrograde values.
As generous as it is indigestible
Narrated by the recurring voice of Cesar’s personal assistant (Laurence Fishburne), “Megalopolis” stands out as an allegory of modern America. A pathetic circus, a grotesque ballet where Coppola juggles politics, the media, finance, fashion and art. All crushed into a mille-feuille as generous as it is indigestible which passes, without warning, from the sublime to the heartbreaking, from the brilliant to the leaden, constantly walking above the void.
If we can be admiring of the hair-raising inventiveness of the film, a sort of XXL patchwork of Coppola’s previous feature films, if we can be transported by certain dizzying sequences (notably the scenes where Cesar influences time like a organic matter), if the purely cinematographic dimension is astonishing, we remain much more skeptical in the face of the pachydermic heaviness with which the filmmaker asserts his point, his morality and his overall very conservative vision of the future of humanity.
>> See the Vertigo cinema debate dedicated to the film:
A wobbly hymn to the human race
The dialogues are akin to bad Shakespeare, sometimes borrowing from Latin, chanting pithy truths, underlining evidence that is, to say the least, hackneyed. With this somewhat unpleasant impression of finding yourself in front of the class of a history-philosophy professor close to senility.
As for this futuristic and utopian city that guru Cesar creates at the end of the film, we are stunned by the sidereal ugliness of the visual effects that Coppola summons to materialize it on the screen. And while the characters all appear in ecstasy in the face of this digital maze which imitates plant motifs, the wonder supposed to touch the audience of “Megalopolis” is absent. A climax for the climax of this parable which imposes a new city in which no one would decently want to live.
Despite all its qualities and the fascination that we can feel towards it, it would still be regrettable if Francis Ford Coppola’s immense work ended with this shaky and clumsy hymn to the future of the genre. human.
Rafael Wolf/eye
“Megalopolis” by Francis Ford Coppola, with Adam Driver, Nathalie Emmanuel, Talia Shire, Dustin Hoffman, Jon Voigt, Giancarlo Esposito, Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBoeuf. To be seen in French-speaking cinemas since September 25, 2024.
Note: 3/5
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