CANNES.- Francis Ford Coppola He premiered his self-financed work on Thursday Megalopolis at the Film Festival Cannes, an exciting, tremendously ambitious project that the 85-year-old director has had in his hands for decades.
Las reviews They ranged from: “insanity of gigantic proportions” to: “the craziest thing I have ever seen in my life.” But it is most likely that, once again, Coppola will be on everyone’s lips inside and outside of Cannes.
No debut this year was more eagerly awaited at the festival than megalopolis, in which Coppola invested $120 million of his own money after selling a portion of his wine estate. Like Apocalypse Now (Apocalypse Now) by Coppola about 45 years ago, Megalopolis It arrived preceded by rumors of production turmoil and doubts about its potential appeal.
What Coppola unveiled defies easy categorization. It’s a fable set in a futuristic New York about an architect (Adam Driver) who has a grand vision of a more harmonious metropolis, and whose talents include the ability to start and stop time. Although Megalopolis It is set in the near future, it is designed like a Roman epic. Driver’s character is named Caesar and the film’s New York includes a modern Colosseum.
The cast includes Aubrey Plaza as an ambitious television journalist named Wow Platinum, Giancarlo Esposito as the mayor, Laurence Fishburne as Caesar’s chauffeur (and the film’s narrator), and Shia LaBeouf as an obnoxious cousin named Claudio.
Premiere in Cannes
Coppola, wearing a straw hat and carrying a cane, walked the Cannes carpet on Thursday, often clinging to the arm of his granddaughter, Romy Coppola Mars, as the soundtrack of The Godfather was playing on the festival speakers.
After the screening, the Cannes audience stood up to applaud Coppola and the film. The director finally took the microphone to emphasize the meaning of his film.
“We are a human family and it is to them that we must pledge our loyalty,” Coppola told the crowd. He added that Hope is: “the most beautiful word in the English language.”
Many reviews of the film were horribly bad. Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian called it: “mega-bloated and mega-boring.” Screen Daily’s Tim Grierson called it: “a mess hampered by arbitrary plotting and mind-numbing excess.” Kevin Maher of the Times of London wrote that it is a: “head-shattering abomination.” Critic Jessica Kiang said that Megalopolis: “It is a madness of such gigantic proportions that it is like observing the true fall of Rome.”
But some critics responded with admiration for the film’s ambition. Lovingly, New York Magazine’s Bilge Ebiri said that the film: “might be the craziest thing I’ve ever seen in my life.” David Ehrlich of IndieWire praised a: “creatively unleashed approach that may not have resulted in a surfeit of dramatically coherent scenes, but underpins the entire film with a looseness that makes it nearly impossible to look away.”
“Is it a work of hubris, a gargantuan folly, or a bold experiment, an imaginative attempt to capture our chaotic contemporary reality, both political and social, through the kind of large-format, high-concept storytelling rarely attempted?” “wrote David Rooney for The Hollywood Reporter. “The truth is, it’s all of those things.”
Film distribution
Megalopolis is dedicated to Eleanor Coppola, the director’s wife who died last month.
Coppola is looking for a distributor for Megalopolis. Prior to its release, the film was acquired for some European territories. Richard Gelfond, CEO of IMAX, said that Megalopolis — which Coppola believes is best viewed in IMAX — will be screened globally on the company’s large-format screens.
At numerous times Megalopolis, Coppola, who once wrote the book Live Cinema and its Techniques, experimentally opposes cinematic conventions. At a screening on Thursday, Jason Schwartzman appeared midway through the film, walked across the stage to a microphone and asked a question to Driver’s character on the screen above.
Several weeks before Cannes, Coppola privately screened Megalopolis in Los Angeles. Word quickly spread that many were baffled by the experimental film they had just seen. “There are no commercial prospects and good for him,” said one of the attendees.
Source: AP
