LE MONDE’S OPINION – NOT TO BE MISSED

Famous for his monumental masterpieces – The Godfather (1972), Apocalypse Now (1979) – Francis Ford Coppola also created true gems in a more modest register, such as The Rain People (1969), The Conversation (1974), and Peggie Sue Got Married (1986). This variability of regimes has always been part of her genius and charm. As he got older, and with Hollywood no longer risking anything, Coppola seemed to convert definitively to this more frugal diet 20 years ago, with films like Tetro (2009) and Twixt (2011).

It was obviously a passing phase. The maestro, caught up in the hubris he loves nothing more than to put on a stage, had been dreaming quietly for several decades of a new lightning bolt and of getting into debt again for the rest of his life. But, at 85 and as long as his name is Coppola, it is worth trying again.

Decline of a civilization

The siren that beckoned him is called Megalopolis. It is an amused, self-reflexive wink, no doubt, but still: a grand baroque farandole, a last-ditch peplum, a futuristic testament, an ode to love, a song for humanity. It is a rollercoaster of tragic pomp and romantic sparks. It takes place in New Rome, somewhere between antiquity and the near future. It could have gone without the Roman parable, which is indeed quickly forgotten. Essentially, it speaks of the inevitable decline of a civilization afflicted by the deadly disease of civilizations: arrogance, lust, confiscated power, the common good subjected to the enrichment of a few, the loss of meaning.

These are the protagonists: Cesar Catalina (Adam Driver), a dark architect, master of time, nobelized inventor of a repairing and eternal material, at work on the utopian vision of a new city; Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), the mayor of New Rome, conservative and pragmatic, erudite, upholding the status quo of old-fashioned power, Cesar’s antithesis; Julia Cicero (Nathalie Emmanuel), the daughter of the former, an admirer of her father, yet madly in love with Cesar, whose utopian ambitions she shares; Hamilton Crassus III (John Voight), a billionaire banker and Cesar’s great-uncle, an unscrupulous gambler who holds the city in his hands; Clodio Pulcher (Shia LaBeouf), Crassus’ grandson, who is deceiving Crassus’ low regard for him with more cynicism and depravity, dreaming of bringing down his cousin Cesar; and Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza), a sex bomb and financial columnist, venal, fatal, mistress of Cesar and wife of the elderly Hamilton Crassus, whom she sets out to rob with the help of her grandson.

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