Near the beginning of Arnaud Desplechin’s docfiction tribute to cinephilia, Spectateurs! (aka Filmlovers! ), the French director describes the feeling that accompanied the arrival of the Seventh Art in his home country: “Cinema, at last.” A similar sentiment came to mind three nights into the Seventy-Seventh Cannes Film Festival while watching Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis , which arrived on the Croisette like a shot of pure cinematic adrenaline after a few days of largely flat and unadventurous programming. Unsurprisingly, Coppola’s long-gestating passion project, about an ambitious architect (Adam Driver) attempting to rebuild a futuristic version of New York City as a sustainable utopia, was met with an extreme divisiveness unseen at Cannes since probably Southland Tales (2006), a similarly extravagant and wayward vision of American politics and modern media culture that fearlessly confronts the viewer’s thematic and aesthetic preconceptions.
As an act of sheer folly, Megalopolis —which the eighty-five-year-old Coppola self-funded to the tune of $120 million, making it one of the most expensive independent films ever produced—demands to be reckoned with, its every garish green-screen flourish, oddball casting decision, and fourth-wall-breaking narrative device a simultaneous flex of creative freedom and affront to conventional notions of good taste. Not unlike Desplechin’s alter ego Paul Dédalus, who at one point in Spectateurs! claims to have seen.
