Cahiers du cinéma n°812 - September 2024Cahiers du cinéma
Megalopolis by Francis Ford Coppola graced the cover of Cahiers du cinéma's 812th issue (September 2024), including an in-depth interview with the American director. It's a free and wild film, where Coppola, who has nothing left to prove, seems to want us to be as free and wild as he is.
The Megalopolis utopia
After nearly 40 years, the movie director's long-awaited project was finally released in September 2024. Pushing the boundaries further than ever before, Francis Ford Coppola received a perplexed reaction at the movie's screening at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival.
Megalopolis (2024)Cahiers du cinéma
For many, he is first and foremost the director of The Godfather—a success that has been both a blessing and a curse. Since then, he has endlessly tried in vain to find other forms and images to dissociate himself from this sacred movie.
With Megalopolis, Coppola gave himself the complete freedom of not owing anyone anything, not even a clear understanding. By directing this movie, he's asking us to be just as liberated and absurd as he is, to forget the confines of good and bad taste, to let go and be completely transported.
Megalopolis (2024)Cahiers du cinéma
The story takes place in New Rome (a mixture of New York and ancient Rome), where renowned architect and inventor Cesar Catilina (played by Adam Driver) opposes the city's mayor Franklyn Cicero (played by Giancarlo Esposito) by proposing to rebuild the city in a completely unprecedented and utopian way.
Megalopolis (2024)Cahiers du cinéma
Coppola stated that he wanted to make a movie from a genre he'd never touched upon before—a Roman epic. "Then came this idea that the United States was a sort of modern version of the Roman Empire, with a similar political system." Cahiers issue no. 812.
The spectacle
Unique and ambivalent, as if directly plucked from the works of Shakespeare, the characters who gravitate around the two men are impossible to define in a simple characteristic or idea. Like in a fable, the plots are intertwined, and the shots are theatrical performances.
Megalopolis (2024)Cahiers du cinéma
Everything is a spectacle; the characters are constantly performing, developing in spaces and backdrops that are continuously moving. Streets become television studio sets, simple dinners become operas, and houses become theaters.
Megalopolis (2024)Cahiers du cinéma
For Coppola, the sets are not static or realistic, they are metaphorical. The movie follows the codes of the theater, circus, opera, and fairground all at the same time.
Time
As well as having the ability to stop time, Cesar Catilina is also the inventor of Megalon, a substance with extraordinary properties able to heal an injured face or be used to rebuild the new city. Cesar manipulates time throughout this story containing constant anachronisms and contradictions.
Megalopolis (2024)Cahiers du cinéma
Coppola also played around with it, to the extent of freezing time in the present using live cinema—fusing the cinematic form with live performance. In fact, in the majority of screenings of Megalopolis, a live actor suddenly appeared at a specific moment to directly interact with Cesar during a press conference.
Megalopolis (2024)Cahiers du cinéma
"Time is the subject of my movie, because I believe artists have always controlled time. Painters stop time, and Goethe said architecture is 'frozen music.' But cinema is, without a doubt, the art form in which you can manipulate time the most." Coppola, Cahiers issue no. 812
Megalopolis (2024)Cahiers du cinéma
So, for a brief moment, the audience found itself suspended in time between the narrative and the present, with a Q&A between the room and screen.
The audience
What makes Megalopolis unique is that it requires us to be a different kind of audience. "I want you to be involved, challenging, asking yourself new questions."
Megalopolis (2024)Cahiers du cinéma
Megalopolis takes the form of something that continues to reinvent and enrich itself, image by image. Coppola is inviting the audience to relinquish control, similar to a sensory experience.
To delve deeper, read Cahiers du Cinéma issue no. 812.
