A long-awaited film
Here at last on the screens, and therefore accessible to ordinary mortals, is Coppola’s final film, which was so hated and criticized at Cannes this year. It must be said that Megalopolis is a disturbing film, both in its political subject and in its direction and acting. However – and Francis Ford Coppola himself acknowledges this – he has always made films that are different in terms of both genre and impact. We will verify this right away. But, to answer his detractors, we would ask for a little more attention and professionalism before condemning to silence the last film of the master who demanded so much effort and pugnacity. Indeed, the director began working on the subject in 1980, not by writing a screenplay as is too often said, as if to insinuate that this film would be the result of an exhumation from a drawer, but by taking notes and cutting out press articles and excerpts from books devoted to the Roman era, from the time of the Catiline conspiracy in the years -60 BC. But, due to lack of funding, the project will not come to fruition. Coppola finally decided to make it in New York in the early 2000s, but unfortunately just at the time of the destruction of the Twin Towers. He abandoned the project once again because he found it indecent to film this scenario about decadence in politics at such a time, but he kept some shocking shots that had been shot by his second unit then in action in New York. The film was postponed again. But in the meantime, the director had already auditioned many actors who would be in the cast of the film.
Ancient Rome in New York
After having weathered the pandemic, and sold part of his Californian vineyards to finance this pharaonic project, filming can begin. Indeed, after many setbacks and hesitations, filming begins in the Trilith studios in Fayetteville, Georgia, on November 7, 2022 and ends on March 11, 2023. It is therefore a film that is particularly close to Coppola’s heart, who renovated an old motel to be able to install the actors, himself and his dear wife to whom the film is dedicated, and rehearsal rooms. Despite its sometimes falsely SF side and its many clumsiness, we cannot take away the film’s controversial side since the director had the courage, rare these days, to draw a parallel between the decadent world of ancient Rome and present-day America, focusing on the flagship city of New York whose art deco architecture, well highlighted by his camera, is inspired by Romanity. Some critics have noted the kitsch side of the staging, frightened because they did not find anything there their Coppola. However, the film has many points in common with its predecessor Dracula(1992) but also with Dark (2009) if only for the originality of the scenario which has nothing to do with it and the presence of an independent actor: the moving Vincent Gallo in Dark and the surprising Adam Driver in Megalopolis. All the actors, whether they are used to the Coppola camera or not, are present, even if they are often unrecognizable, starting with Dustin Hoffman, but so many others like Shia Labeouf, John Voight and Laurence Fishburne… The actors are certainly uneven, but what is perhaps the most annoying in the film is the orange color of most of the images, due to Roman Coppola (?), an atmosphere that is too stifling, even worse than that of Fifth Element by Luc Besson (1997).
Many references
Without being a referential film, the film does not of course go without evoking The future life (1936) by William Cameron Menzies, which Coppola admits to having seen when he was very young, but of course Metropolis by Fritz Lang (1927). We could also notice a certain kinship with another film hated at Cannes, Cosmopolis by David Cronenberg (2012) produced by Paulo Branco. But one would almost be entitled to wonder if Francis Ford Coppola’s latest film would not also and above all be a tribute to an Italian filmmaker who often depicted decadence and the end of a world. Indeed, with its baroque, lesbian, apocalyptic and Roman-filled side, Megalopolis probably also draws a lot of inspiration from Fellini – Satyricon (1969) and a little of the Caligula by Tinto Brass (1979) which is being re-edited and remastered this year. Moreover, Coppola himself acknowledges many of the references that he sets out in his statement of intent: “I could not have made Megalopolis without relying on George Bernard Shaw, Voltaire, Rousseau, Bentham, Mill, Dickens, Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, Fournier, Morris, Carlyle, Ruskin, Butler, and Wells; or on Euripides, Thomas More, Molière, Pirandello, Shakespeare, Beaumarchais, Swift, Kubrick, Murnau, Goethe, Plato, Aeschylus, Spinoza, Durrell, Ibsen, Fellini, Visconti, Bergman, Bergson, Hesse, Hitchcock, Kurosawa, Cao Xueqin, Mizoguchi, Tolstoy, McCullough, Moses and all the prophets.” To end with a pious wish that will certainly not come true: “I dream that Megalopolis becomes a traditional New Year’s Eve movie and that the audience discusses, after the screening, not their new diet or their resolution to quit smoking, but this simple question: “Is the society we live in the only one available to us?”
Related News :