The rise of the steps will go down in history, the film not necessarily: Cannes rolled out the red carpet on Thursday for Francis Ford Coppola, 85, who unveiled “Megalopolis”, presented as his ultimate masterpiece but which risks knocking out .
“I dedicate my film to hope and children. Let’s create a world for children,” declared the director, to applause at the end of the official screening.
“We don’t make art if we don’t take risks,” underlined the legendary filmmaker in an interview on France 2 recorded before his rise to the top, about this pharaonic project in which he invested his fortune. personal to the tune of 120 million dollars.
In New Rome, a fictional megalopolis at the crossroads of New York, ancient Rome and Gotham City, Francis Ford Coppola imagines the struggle between an aging mayor, played by Giancarlo Esposito, and the president of his planning commission, played by Adam Driver.
The latter wants to rebuild the city, whose statues are collapsing, using a revolutionary material of his invention, Megalon, which is to replace concrete. And falls in love with his rival’s daughter, played by Nathalie Emmanuel (“Game of Thrones”).
“Megalopolis” explores many avenues – Adam Driver can stop time with a snap of his fingers, which prevents him from making a dizzying fall from the top of a building, a Soviet satellite threatens to crash and deviates from its trajectory, Shia LaBeouf conspires against those in power – only to abandon them.
It goes from a quote from Shakespeare to an archive image of Hitler, and carries a critique of capitalist society and populism à la Donald Trump – which one might have expected to be sharper from the author of “Apocalypse Now”, a masterpiece with Dantesque filming which resonated at its time with the wounds of an America emerging from the Vietnam War.
“We could lose our republic. The republic and democracy are precious, having a king would be going backwards,” insisted the director on France 2.
Uncertain potential
Comparing today’s America to the decadent Roman Empire, the film combines elements of science fiction, new age thinking and neo-antique style. A mixture which risks losing its audience.
But perhaps this film, unlike any other, will capsize the jury chaired by Greta Gerwig?
After forty years of gestation, during which Coppola dreamed of this project without bringing it to fruition, the director sunk part of his fortune into it, even selling vines. In Cannes, he took the risk of going into competition, hoping for a third Palme d’Or which would be historic, after “Secret Conversation” (1974) and “Apocalypse Now” (1979).
“When everyone was criticizing me, Cannes changed the public’s view of +Apocalypse now+, so for this film, who knows? », noted Coppola in his interview.
A sign of its very uncertain commercial potential, “Megalopolis”, produced outside the circuits of the major studios, has not yet found a distributor in the United States.
How can we imagine distributing it widely when in the middle of the 02:18 hours of the feature film, a flesh-and-blood actor gets up in the cinema to speak directly to the screen, for a dialogue with Adam Driver?
What remains is the line-up of five-star actors, stars of the 1970s like Jon Voight and close friends of Coppola including his sister, Talia Shire, who plays the mother of Adam Driver’s character or even Laurence Fishburne, who played a teenager in “Apocalypse Now” .
Their climb of the steps, straw hat and cane in hand for Coppola, to the music of “The Godfather”, will go down in the history of the Festival, as the probable farewell of one of the last legends of New Hollywood. And a big absence for Coppola, his wife Eleanor, to whom he was married for sixty years, died on April 12.
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