Megalopolis - Masterpiece or Disaster? - OFF TOPIC

It is impossible to not feel indecisive after finishing Francis Ford Coppola's latest grand scale work. The easiest route would be to just label it as a hot mess, and be done with it. Yet, under all that confusion lies a film that is either naively smart, or smartly naive, but more probably, both, and perhaps there lies its genius.

To describe what happens in Megalopolis is impossible: yes, Adam Driver's role as Caesar Catilina, an architect that wishes to rebuild New Rome - located on the grounds of New York - is indeed a central figure in the film, but that would be fairly reductive: it is more of a large fresco of a decaying and opulent society, a sort of modern, literal roman empire - with all its imagery like the gladiator fights and social customs like the Saturnalia, the aristocracy, with its names which are not casual at all; Driver's Catilina is an adversary of Giancarlo Esposito's Cicero, an interesting reversal of roles, as history has often rather sided on Cicero than Catilina, whereas this film chooses the latter as the antagonist - even if the characterisations are completely different from the historical figures, the characters do share their allegiances: Catilina seeks to subvert the status quo, Cicero to maintain it, be it a total chaos. A chaos that is almost envied by Fellini's Satyricon due to the size of certain scenes. 

A chaos - and incoherence - that remains throughout the feature film, but that slowly seems to channel itself into a form of order: the same route that most shakespearian comedies take on. Even the scene that introduces the various players of the film feels taken out from a shakespearian play - and not because of the direct quotes, but because of its disorderly dialogues. Throughout the ending, this sort of theater quality to certain interactions remains, and while it is alienating sometimes, it also is one of the most amusing aspects of the film.

Despite its occasional stageplay qualities,  Megalopolis is nothing short of cinematic, primarily visual, and oddly enough its strongest moments are not the giant set pieces that seem to come from a modernised Ben Hur, but in the use of image layers, a technique Coppola already mastered in Apocalypse Now, but that here reaches a new form of excellence. With Megalopolis, Coppola reaches a new form of surrealism he never accomplished before. The science fiction is just a backdrop, Catilina's capacity ti stop time has a thematic explanation rather than a pseudo-scientific one: he's an artist, and artists have the power of blocking time; this hallucinatory, continuous persistence of surreal and supernatural coexists with the movie with a bravery seldom seen in XXIst Century cinema.

In a similar mechanism to Luhrmann's movies, as the film proceeds, the chaos becomes clearer, the ideas can be discerned. Megalopolis feels like a pantheistic work, heterogeneous, very abstractly centered on the topic of the Utopia, an idea promoted continuously by Catilina. As a result, the film itself starts to present some suggestions, slogans, optimistic intentions, albeit abstract. The ending especially can come off as naive for this exact reason - but the film is very much aware of this, as Catilina points out, the purpose of Utopias are to start a conversation.

While Megalopolis very self-aware that it is artistic work, and as such, its purpose and influence remains abstract, and that it is a deal-no deal film (you'll either hate it or love it), regardless it does incite the viewer to a reflection, and strikes a conversation - not on anything concrete perhaps, but an abstract train of thought that can inspire in some ways. Thus, the Utopia of Megalopolis is achieved with its intended purpose, outside of the screen-  and the resulting discussion cannot avoid being as caothic as the film itself.