Megalopolis: Completely crazy, for better and especially for worse [critique]

Miraculously, the new Coppola flirts with all the limits. But his Manichean discourse repeated ad nauseam leads the film towards its own downfall.

Here it is at last, Francis Ford Ford Coppola's Arlesian, this film fantasized nearly 40 years ago for which he invested 120 million dollars of his own pocket, and whose backbone consists of modeling the fall of the American empire on that of the Roman Empire: in New Rome, a sort of futuristic New York, Caesar Catilina (Adam Driver), a genius architect capable of stopping time, clashes with the arch-conservative mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito). One wants to make his city evolve into an ecological utopia, the other remains attached to the status quo. The beginnings of a baroque and lame fresco, a pile-up of disparate ideas (the script has never stopped being updated for four decades, and it shows). In turn peplum, comedy, political or anticipation film… Megalopolis overflows on all sides, vomiting digital special effects from another age. Coppola, 85, assumes everything: the theatricality and the borrowings from cabaret as well as the mixture of first and second degree (Aubrey Plaza and Shia LaBeouf, hilarious, but who seem to be acting in another feature film). The demiurge has given himself the mission of pushing the limits of the form in cinema, but his visual and narrative experiments never manage to mask a statement of a confounding naivety, opposing the imagination of artists to the lukewarmness of men incapable of dreaming big enough to save humanity. A Manichean discourse repeated ad nauseam, which leads the film towards its own downfall.

Of Francis Ford Coppola. With Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito, Nathalie Emmanuel… Duration 2 h 18. Released on September 25, 2024