Megalopolis
Clearly, whatever impulse Francis Ford Coppola had when he decided to mix Virgil with Shakespeare, “Vertigo” with “The Fountainhead,” Robert Moses with film noir and sci-fi into one movie it was not the most actionable impulse. “Megalopolis,” which is extremely old in the making, has been on his mind for 40 years or more. The self-financed movie he brought to Cannes this week is a proof of concept for a concept that, as far as anyone can tell, has never been defined.
But if coherence has eluded Coppola here, that is not at all the same thing as watchability. No one who loves obsessive filmmaking could fail to be flabbergasted (in a good way) by what he’s put on screen. Directed, produced and written (though without much apparent regard for narrative shape) by Coppola himself “Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis: A Fable,” the titles call it this is an entirely uninhibited work.
“Southland Tales,” Richard Kelly’s overstuff ed (and unfairly reviled!) folly from 2006, may come to mind; that film had more to say about its moment, the George W. Bush era. Coppola aims for something more eternal: “Megalopolis” takes place in “New Rome” in the 21st century (that’s the third millennium, lest we forget). The city looks like New York with fashionably updated Roman outfits and hairdos (though City Hall station is modeled after a landmark that closed in 1945). Grand Central Terminal has been emblazoned with a cautionary analogy of the American republic to ancient Rome.
At the center of the movie is a conflict between Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver), an unelected chairman of New Rome’s design authority division who also happens to be its chief constructorlike Robert Moses, and Mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), who as district attorney failed to prosecute Catilina when his wife vanished. Catilina is an unyielding, in the words of his mistress, a TV reporter named Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza), “obsessive compulsive wacko.” The character unfortunately rings closer to Ayn Rand’s Howard Roark than to Coppola’s Preston Tucker: He wants to build a utopian city out of a stuff called “megalon,” which is supposed to be indestructible, unlike concrete. Julia (a lustrous if waveringly accented Nathalie Emmanuel), the daughter of Cicero, goes to work for him.
According to Coppola, Catilina can stop time. This is a feature of true artists and it demonstrates that they can control or capture time just like in film making, music composition and painting among other creative areas. “Megalopolis” seems to be Francis Ford Coppola’s greatest work, not only because the plot refers to “Francis” many times.
Coppola has not only communicated with past filmmakers (there are nods to Hitchcock in a dolly zoom from “Vertigo” and a newspaper headline), but all literature as well. In a conversation between him and Julia, Catillina quotes from both “Hamlet” and “The Tempest.” He asks sarcastically if she is capable of plowing through the riches of his Emersonian mind. At some point Cicero complains that Petrarch has been misquoted by Catilina.
However, even though it is lofty in this way too Coppolas’ movie also revels in its bawdiness with lots of pop culture trash scattered about for good measure. A Vestal Virgin (Grace VanderWaal) who was one among the city’s treasures performs at Madison Square Garden during halftime show equivalent super bowl new rome. The sybaritic banker Hamilton Crassus III (Jon Voight) has front row seats which he shouldn’t be allowed to have because Jon Voigt doesn’t fit role such that you wish Charles Laughton or Peter Ustinov were alive today playing him; while on earth did they cast voigt here?? And then there’s also Clodio played by Shia Labeouf so what better place than putting catullus poetry into his mouth? There are moments when dialogue collapsed across periods sounds embarrassing I’m sure someone noticed this before release! But even more mind bogglingly script incorporates aspects string theory Chinese satellite bionic limbs facial grafts into its plots remember bows arrows people get shot with are used in this movie.
Sometimes it feels like everything must have made the cut running at 138 minutes, shorter than it actually is though but some characters seem underwritten and certain soundstage sets don’t seem dressed enough. Every now and then Dustin Hoffman runs in and out of scenes for no particular reason. We never learn enough about Catiline’s backstory or why his wife disappeared (though what does come across strongly personal is how much he always loved her). This may well be an unfinished film given that its concept keeps changing along references, one can’t help watching digitized special effects without wondering what they might look like had Coppola shot on celluloid several decades earlier teamed up storaro Tavoularis hollywood system behind him too much even sign studio any could hardly imagine this happening! In “Twixt” (2011) his previous feature until now at one point director breaks fourth wall trying add interactive element shows us once again age 85 still pushing boundaries like those seen during time when making such movies were thought impossible considering who directed “The Godfather” or “Apocalypse Now”.
After “Megalopolis,” I don’t know what to do with Andrea Arnold’s “Bird” except to say that its main trick is starting from her customary mode of kitchen sink realism (“Fish Tank”) and then adding let’s go with an element of the surreal, which is a character called Bird (Franz Rogowski), a mysterious, ghostly, skirt-wearing man who is looking for his parents, and sometimes perches himself on top of a building as if he were one. That seemed pretty weird this afternoon, but then the Coppola happened.
So let’s just say “Bird” is a slow-burning, well-observed movie about Bailey (Nykiya Adams), a 12 year old whose father Bug (Barry Keoghan) seems so young in relation to her that when we find out how they’re related it’s like: Oh. But becoming very young parents is normal at Tyler House, where Bailey and her half-brother Hunter live with Bug. Now Bug, finally moving toward what he sees as an adult life, is marrying, Bailey fears the fiancée and her child will freeloade. Bailey’s other half-siblings live someplace else with their mother. It’s an odd portrait of broken families that somehow still maintain something like a common nest.
Two pictures in the festival have found two of the world’s most adventurous nonfiction filmmakers turning to dramatization without quite leaving behind their old methods.
In the denatured Civil War picture “The Damned,” set in 1862, Roberto Minervini imagines what life might have been like for a party of Union soldiers assigned to patrol and protect uncharted borderlands in the West (it was filmed in Montana). The men generally unnamed but identifiable by attitude and facial hair are a mix of young and old; idealistic and embittered; fighting for what they see as a divine cause or fighting for a paycheck. Sometimes the sound is mixed so that their voices aren’t privileged above the harsh environment.
Like Kelly Reichardt’s minimalist western “Meek’s Cutoff” (but even more minimalistically), “The Damned” focuses on the hard work and solitude of trying to get through untamed territory. They hunt; they handle wagon trouble, they pitch tents; they examine rocks; a 16 year old fighter learns how to cock a gun. When, after about half an hour of screen time, an unseen enemy suddenly starts shooting, we only see violence in the form of gunfire sparks and bullet impacts those on the other side of the firefight are never glimpsed, but we gather that they’ve been dealing with elements and tediums much like our men.
The lack of incident is the point (the last line “it’s so quiet” could have been spoken during almost any scene). It’s an interesting departure for Minervini, though a certain amount of abstraction at its core prevents it from reaching the heights of his two most recent documentary features, “The Other Side” and “What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire?,” which dealt concretely and specifically with issues including race, economics and political action. By design, “The Damned” ponders a void.
Cambodian born filmmaker Rithy Panh survived the Khmer Rouge regime and has made its brutality and consequences his career subject, his best known film is probably “The Missing Picture,” which was nominated for a foreign-language film Oscar.
The movie “Meeting with Pol Pot” keeps in place as certain of that film’s conceits: it shows its characters through clay figurines in some scenes. But “Meeting with Pol Pot” is a fictional feature. Elizabeth Becker and Richard Dudman, two journalists, and Malcolm Caldwell, a pro-Khmer Rouge academic were among the few westerners allowed to visit Cambodia under Pol Pot in 1978. Caldwell didn’t make it back.
Based on a book by Becker, “Meeting with Pol Pot” follows three fabricated French reporters Lise (Irène Jacob), Paul (Cyril Gueï) and Alain (Grégoire Colin) on a barely disguised version of that mission. It begins with their arrival in Cambodia, where they quickly learn they won’t be given straight answers or any freedom to set their agenda. Housed in cell like quarters, they’re taken on official tours, where they’re fed suspiciously abundant food and shown suspiciously quiet locals at least until Paul, a photographer, slips away from the group and manages to snap photos that contain evidence of starvation and murder.
But are the journalists who know they’re only in Cambodia because they have permission complicit in being played? How do you practice journalism when a totalitarian regime has you at gunpoint for the entire time? In asking those questions, “Meeting with Pol Pot” is a conventional, message-driven historical drama in some respects (some of the expository dialogue is clunky). But the director’s bolder choices give it some sting besides the figurines, he uses archival footage in counterintuitive ways.
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