Visionary inventor and architect Cesar Catilina hangs over futuristic New York. The fact that he can stop time prevents him from falling from the highest skyscraper. And time seemed to stand still in the entire film Megalopolis, which director Francis Ford Coppola dreamed of for almost half a century.
This fable, as the subtitle of the $120 million work reads, wants to talk about today and the future. But the past is catching up with her more than she would like. Czech cinemas have been screening Megalopolis since last Thursday.
The film works with the past constantly and deliberately. The city that Adam Driver, in the role of Cesare Catilina, wants to change for the better with the help of special technology is a bit of New York, a bit of Metropolis from the 1927 sci-fi classic of the same name, and also a kind of futuristic version of ancient Rome. And the whole picture – in addition to having elements of a fable and everyone in it being simplified to archetypal beings – seems like a variation on some rather bizarre tragedy by William Shakespeare.
Francis Ford Coppola is one of the creators who have been protesting against today’s Hollywood for a long time. In the 70s of the last century, his generation of the so-called New Hollywood brought fresh ideas, an authorial approach and a film language inspired by European trends to American cinema.
Now it is as if the long-established author of the classics Apocalypse or The Godfather, belonging to the film canon, wants to defy Hollywood. And work completely freely.
Megalopolis is the obvious last point in the career of the eighty-five-year-old man, who had to sell part of his vineyards for the sake of the film in order to invest $120 million in it from his own pocket, which translates to almost 2.8 billion crowns.
Aubrey Plaza plays the ambitious TV star Wow Platinum. | Photo: American Zoetrope
Thanks to this, Coppola did not have to look left or right while filming. The result is a similar battle with windmills to another project decades in the making: director Terry Gilliam’s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. After all, he is also now preparing a film, which he does not want to finance even partially with Hollywood money.
Both Quixote and Megalopolis, which coincidentally star Adam Driver, are intensely personal works. The hero can easily be read as the creator’s alter ego.
Cesar Catilina wants to change the face of a corrupt, morally rotten city, but the mayor vilifies him for killing his wife, and others plot against the protagonist.
Megalopolis is full of sly villains, tense emotions, and visually extravagant scenery. Even beautiful women who can easily turn out to be femme fatales.
Coppola deliberately flips through a book of film techniques – from ancient and endearingly clumsy, like calendar tickets marking the passage of time, through dividing the canvas into multiple images in the spirit of 70s cinematography, to opulently recolored “baroque” 80s and digital scenes reminiscent of hallucinations, which the computer screen saver suffers from sometime since the turn of the millennium.
Czech cinemas have been showing the movie Megalopolis since last Thursday. | Video: Film Europe
He clearly did a lot of it on purpose. Megalopolis is supposed to be a somewhat tacky dystopian world that can only be saved by an architect with resources and vision.
It’s a remarkable paradox. Coppola seems to stand against the system and its numbing effects on the one hand, but on the other hand he advocates for a strong industrialist who is the only one who can take action against injustice.
Coppola is one of the artists who, like his peer Martin Scorsese, criticizes comic films as one of the examples of where Hollywood has evolved. At the same time, in spite of formally completely unusual procedures, far removed from the mainstream spectacle, he has now created a similarly banal story about the clash of good and evil.
While the better and more ambitious comic pictures about influential millionaires with advanced technology tend to be raw, realistic and critical of the protagonists, Megalopolis puts a similar character on a pedestal.
However, Cesar Catilina is not Batman, rather he resembles a “visionary” of the Elon Musk type, an explosive mixture of exaggerated ego and ambition, which can be seductive and intoxicating, but also dangerous.
Megalopolis can be viewed similarly. Like a wondrous relic of gigantic dimensions and intentions, in which Latin is spoken, Shakespeare is sometimes – sometimes literally – quoted, but at the same time it is only a fever dream doomed to soon fade from memory.
Coppola works with simple characters, lots of symbols, motifs of betrayal and love known from tragedies, but he renounces the classic narrative structure. Rather, it offers the audience a series of scenes that want to be intense, even overwhelming.
Cesar Catilina played by Adam Driver (right) resembles an Elon Musk-type “visionary”. On the left is Nathalie Emmanuel in the role of Juliet. | Photo: American Zoetrope
Megalopolis is not an alternative to contemporary Hollywood. Rather, the embodiment of cinematography from a kind of alternative reality, where the film was never created and where some of its procedures are only occasionally used randomly.
Otherwise, we watch a mixture of ancient, often theatrical dialogues and gestures, which nonetheless have a certain, if somewhat perverse, impact.
Sadly, this feat says more about the visionary than his vision. Apart from simple allegorical truths, we learn almost nothing about the city itself and its functioning. We can just enjoy the trifles here and there, like the fact that the Madison Square Garden sports hall has become a kind of futuristic coliseum.
Ambitious creators often put everything in their hearts into their debut. Coppola gave his all in what is likely to be his last film. Megalopolis is a geyser of ideas and imagination. A geyser where the difference between the subtle and the banal is blurred. A world unto itself. However, the question remains as to who will be able to enter it and will like to stay in it.
Film
Megalopolis
Screenplay and direction: Francis Ford Coppola
Film Europe, Czech premiere on October 17.