A film that Francis Ford Coppola has been obsessed with for 40 years. Naturally, we can only understand the urgency for this film legend to finally realize his dream. But a dream fulfilled doesn’t necessarily make a good feature film.
What would you do with $120 million? Freedom has a price that the studios will never give you. Francis Ford Coppola knows this all too well. With 85 years under your belt, you’re bound to have second thoughts. And then, imagine, you’ve been working on a project for decades, a project that haunts your nights, that obsesses you right to the throne, a project whose subject matter and exact purpose surely evolve over time. So, in the end, it’s not very difficult to understand the choice of this sacred monster of cinema to come to terms with an obsession.
But does a film freed from the weight of the studios necessarily make a good film? Unfortunately, the answer is no. The result is a work that has the merit of being able to indulge in almost anything, but not with much panache. A work that loses itself in its desire to play up the metaphor of a city, New York City, transformed into a kind of futuristic Rome. A work that also gets lost in a heap of philosophical reflections: what is time? Can we govern with kindness? Is love the only possible path to redemption? Etc.
All this makes Megalopolis far too talkative… but that’s not all. It’s also a feature-length film of almost two hours and twenty minutes, in which there is hardly a sequence without music. Is Coppola afraid of letting the viewer’s emotions flow without the support of an omnipresent soundtrack? Let’s hope the filmmaker doesn’t leave us this film as a testament. He undoubtedly still has a lot to tell us with his universe, which we can’t deny is unique.
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