[COLUMN] Darren’s Cannes Diary, Day Three - The Premiere of Coppola’s Megalopolis | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

With the third day of Cannes, things are really heating up. It’s a pretty big day for the festival, featuring press screenings and premieres of fairly significant features.

Of course, the biggest event of the day – and one of the biggest events of the festival – is the premiere of Francis Ford Coppola’ Megalopolis (★★☆☆☆). Nearly half a century ago, Coppola visited Cannes with an incomplete cut of Apocalypse Now, an infamously troubled production not too far removed from Megalopolis. On that occasion, despite all the chaos involved in the film’s production and postproduction, Coppola went home with the Palme d’or.

He seems unlikely to repeat that trick with Megalopolis, a film that had apparently been brewing for almost forty years and in various stages of active development for twenty. The words “passion project” are a double-edged sword, particularly for legendary directors like Coppola. There is a sense in which any meal like this arrives overstuffed and overcooked, something that a filmmaker has been considering for so long that it makes no real sense to anybody by themselves.

The plot of Megalopolis is disarmingly straightforward. Set in an alternate New York City known as “New Rome”, the film follows legendary architect Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver). Catilina’s life has been defined by triumph and tragedy; the mysterious death of his wife and the discovery of the miracle metal Megalon. Catilina hopes to build a new city and new future, but faces resistance from the establishment, including Mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito).

Megalopolis has had a storied and troubled production. The word at early industry screenings in Los Angeles was that it was “unreleasable.” This weekend, before its premiere, an in-depth report from The Guardian documented trouble on the set. A Cannes diary is probably not the best place to work through such accounts and gossip, but the coverage of Megalopolis has conflated actual serious reports of misconduct that merit further investigation with simple directorial decision-making.

So the film arrives with a heavy mix of anticipation and dread. To put it simply: Megalopolis is a mess. It’s disjointed, uneven, tonally chaotic and often internally contradictory. While those reports that it was “unreleasable” are an obvious exaggeration, it’s fairly easy to see why the studios balked at the idea of releasing the film. It’s not a late Scorsese project or a late Spielberg project. Hell, it’s not even a late Schrader project. It is hard to recommend Megalopolis without severe qualifications.

Megalopolis works in fits and starts, but never at a sustained pace. It has a surreal texture, occasionally feeling like a late addition to the wave of late ’90s Shakespearean adaptations that updated a classic play into the modern day or something decidedly out of time: Romeo + Juliet, Titus Andronicus, O.  At times, Megalopolis feels like a riff on a Shakespeare play that only Coppola has ever read. Watching it, one wonders if there have already been four or five adaptations of Megalopolis, and this is just Coppola taking his stab at an old classic.

This isn’t too much of an exaggeration. Major plot-reshaping events happen largely off-screen, with news of catastrophe carried into the scene by an unnamed supporting character. Seemingly major characters are killed between scenes, their deaths only revealed in quick flashbacks through exposition dialogue. It’s narrative chaos, the kind of thing that is only really cinematically legible to an audience with some pre-existing familiarity with the source material.

That said, there are moments when the film threatens to cohere. Driver remains one of the few modern leads with what might be described as “big ’70s energy.” Unfortunately, Shia LaBeouf does not have that energy as Catilina’s scheming cousin, Clodio Pulcher. Perhaps the movie might have been improved had Oscar Isaac remained involved. However, for every moment that clicks, there’s an entire scene built around some deeply upsetting premise like Jon Voight’s erection.

Still, there’s something deeply moving in the simple fact of the film’s existence. This is a work about an arrogant artist crippled by the separation from his wife, trying desperately to imagine a new and exciting future while trapped by his own past. It’s a decidedly Oedipal movie, both literally and figuratively. It is haunted by Coppola himself - his films, his family, even the name “Francis.” The film’s interests are very much those of Coppola.

Indeed, much of Coppola’s recent filmography – Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Jack, Youth Without Youth – grapples with the same basic anxiety, the fear that time is simply running out too quickly. There’s a lot of Coppola in Catilina, another maverick artist who wants to reinvent the form while pushing against the establishment. Indeed, even when Megalopolis doesn’t work, it’s always formally interesting. This is the work of a director still in love with the medium, decades later.

Megalopolis is a celebration of old and new cinematic form: montage, overlay, double exposure. It’s also very much pushing at the edge of the fourth wall; every screening so far involves a scene in which a real-life performer interacts with Catilina on screen, which makes it hard to replicate as a widely distributed film. It’s also full of big ideas. It’s a film about the state of cinema as an artform, about the decline of modern America, and what an artist leaves behind.

Megalopolis does not work. However, Megalopolis is also a film that should not exist, which makes it strangely appealing and alluring, in its own way. It might not be the best film I’ve seen at Cannes so far, but it’s the only one that really made me think about watching Abel Gance’s Napoléon on the opening afternoon. That’s something to the movie’s credit, despite its deep-seated dysfunction. There are worse things to be than an ambitious mess.

The day’s other big premiere was Andrea Arnold’s Bird (★★★☆☆), Arnold’s first feature film since American Honey in 2016. The film finds Arnold returning to a naturalistic portrayal of working-class British life, following a young girl named Bailey (Nykiya Adams) who is navigating a tough week. Her father, Bug (Barry Keoghan), is getting remarried, and promising to finance the wedding by selling hallucinogenic toad slime. Bug is well-meaning and occasionally even sweet, but not the best father.

Wandering through the estates and council houses, Bailey strikes up a relationship with a deeply peculiar individual named Bird (Franz Rogowski). Bird has returned home in an effort to reconnect with his parents, but finds they no longer live at their old address. Against her better judgement, and tempering her well-honed cynicism, Bailey decides to help Bird in his quest for familial reconciliation. Naturally, Bailey’s own complicated family faces its own trials over the week that follows.

Bird is essentially a modern grounded fairytale, an attempt to update those classic stories about feral and abandoned children for the modern world. All of the younger characters in Bird have essentially been abandoned or neglected, left to fend for themselves. Bailey’s elder brother Hunter (Jason Buda) has even joined up with a rogue band of youths who protect the abused, stepping into the role traditionally occupied by the largely absent law enforcement community.

Bird doesn’t entirely work. It struggles a little bit with tone, reconciling the magical with the realism. Arnold’s style has always tended towards naturalism. Indeed, her most notable project between American Honey and Bird was a documentary titled Cow. However, there are moments in Bird that embrace fantasy to varying degrees, and these always feel like distracting and unnatural intrusions into an otherwise fully-formed world populated by grounded characters.

That said, there is a lot to like here. Adams is essentially tasked with carrying the entire movie on her shoulders, to the point that a significant portion of the film focuses on Bailey in isolation, and she does a truly remarkable job. Keoghan is also a standout in a role that could easily go awry in lesser hands. It’s the kind of role that Keoghan has always played well, and the kind that one worries he might drift away from as he enters the blockbuster machine with films like Eternals and The Batman.

(Just as an aside, it’s worth shouting out the poor – presumably French – transcriber tasked with providing the English subtitles for the festival screening of Bird. It’s remarkable work, but Arnold’s style and Keoghan’s performance embrace a sort of naturalism that seems a challenge. At one point, Bug complains about Bailey “makin’ a showa [him], like”, which transcribed as “taking a shower later.” Also, the movie features an A+ diss of Saltburn. A Saltburn, if you will.)

Outside of the big two, the day was largely solid. Smaller treats included a screening of Locust (★★☆☆☆), the debut film from Taiwanese multidisciplinary artist Keff. The film follows Zhong-Han (Liu Wei-Chen), a young mute man who helps out at a small noodle shop operated by Rong (Yu An-Shun) and who moonlights as a gangland enforcer. Along the way, he strikes up a surprisingly sweet relationship with a convenience store clerk named I-Ju (Rimong Ihwar).

This is all fairly standard stuff. It’s a gangland drama about a character caught between two worlds, expressing their violence and inevitably confronted with the reality that their actions hurt those close to them. Keff infuses the story with a potent political allegory. The movie is very firmly set in the middle of 2019, not just to avoid dealing with COVID, but also to situate the drama in the context of the real-life clampdown on civil rights in Hong Kong by Chinese authorities.

This is not exactly a subtle metaphor. As Rong finds his eatery squeezed by the local criminal element and a property developer looking to tear it down and build condominiums, the Taiwanese characters watch brutal Chinese oppression unfold in real-time. It’s ridiculously over-signified, even before the film goes out of its way to underscore the connection between Chinese authorities and Triad gangs in Hong Kong. Indeed, the movie’s biggest twists are all revealed by its thematic exposition.

There is a sense that Locust believes subtlety to be overrated, but this is an understandable impulse for a filmmaker working on their first feature. It’s the sort of narrative misstep that will hopefully be avoided in later projects. Locust also suffers from indecision around its ending. The movie ends at least three times, but never seems particularly convinced that any of them are strong enough. It’s a frustrating indecisiveness, particularly in the context of a genre that has a fairly sturdy template.

Still, allowing for these issues, there is a certain charm to Locust. Keff has a good eye for composition, and the film arguably works best in the scenes that are lightest in dialogue, such as Zhong-Han’s escape into local clubs, where his lack of speech is not an issue. The cast is also incredibly appealing, particularly Liu Wei-Chen, Rimong Ihwar, and Yu An-Shun. Locust is a little heavy-handed and over-familiar, but it’s not bad.

It was also a good day for popcorn entertainment. The press screening of George Miller’s Furiosa (★★★★☆) provided an opportunity to revisit the film free of the weight of expectation and anticipation, and also without the stars and directors in the room at the same time. While critics try to distance themselves from such concerns, there’s no denying that a star-studded worldwide premiere is a strange context in which to see a film.

Rewatch was kind to Furiosa, as it tends to be with these sorts of big sweeping movies. Knowing the finer problems with the film going in, it’s easier to take a step back and appreciate the film as a whole. While Fury Road was a film that was visceral and immediate, Furiosa oddly benefits from a bigger picture approach. Much like Miller’s last film, Three Thousand Years of Longing, Furiosa is a movie that feels properly sweeping in its scope.

Of particular interest this time around was how much attention the film pays to putting together and taking apart vehicles. The villain Dementus (Chris Hemsworth) is introduced studying a partially-complete motorbike listening to discussions of its mechanics. During her mission to rescue a young Furiosa (Alyla Browne), Mary Jo (Charlee Fraser) is forced to rebuild a motorbike from various pieces. The construction of the war rig under Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme) is a major plot point.

There is a recurring fear that, in such a world, human beings are similar. Dementus’ on-hand doctor introduces himself as “the Organic Mechanic” (Angus Sampson), and Dementus maintains his own health by feeding off the “human blood sausage” taken from young “full-life” Furiosa. Human beings become part of the machinery. It is no secret that Furiosa (Anya Taylor-Joy) will get a mechanical hand. They are also crushed beneath and torn apart by it.

The Mad Max franchise was initially about the collapse of civilization, but Furiosa feels in many ways like a cynical interrogation of how certain styles of society sustain themselves through the end of the world. The film takes a very big picture look at this world operated by “bigshots”, and just how carefully those systems are balanced by the people who profit from them. Furiosa fears that there are certain structures and ideas so resilient that they will survive even the end of the world.

In hindsight, maybe the midnight screening of Soi Cheang’s Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In (★★★★☆) was a bad idea, given my early diary deadline. On the other hand, maybe it was an awesome idea. There are screenings of Twilight of the Warriors running later in the week, but Twilight of the Warriors really feels like a film that benefits from a midnight madness crowd, even wearing tuxedos. This is the kind of film where a character catches a sword swing with their teeth. Twice. It rules, is what I’m saying.

Set in the walled city of Kowloon in Hong Kong during the 1980s, Twilight of the Warriors is a fascinating study of urban spaces. The film understands that – even more than most major cities – Hong Kong is built vertically. It’s layers upon layers upon layers, piled on top of one another in order to maximize space on a relatively contained island. As the film repeatedly demonstrates, this is an island so small that landing aircraft almost brush against the tenement roofs.

The production design on Twilight of the Warriors is outstanding, creating a maze of corridors and chasms, populated with pipes and wires, delivering a real sense of claustrophobia and community. A drug lab is seemingly only a few steps away from a wonderfully tidy barber shop operated by the community’s patriarch, Cyclone (Louis Koo). The film looks gorgeous, both in its set construction, but also in its period costuming and production design.

The action is stunning. The set pieces are obviously augmented with computer-generated imagery, but never in a way that diminishes or undermines the actual work being done by the actors and stunt performers. The movie’s opening and closing acts are virtuoso action filmmaking, an obvious and affectionate callback to the Hong Kong films from the era in which Twilight of the Warriors is set. As much as this is a celebration of Kowloon, it’s also a celebration of Hong Kong action.

Indeed, watching Twilight of the Warriors underscores the issues with the attempts to evoke Hong Kong action in American films like Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. Despite the stunt talent involved in that movie, the sequences were clumsy and unconvincing. Twilight of the Warriors demonstrates that computer-generated effects can be a great assistance to filmmakers working the genre, the problem was simply that Shang-Chi employed them very poorly.

There are some issues with Twilight of the Warriors. As with a lot of these movies, the second act is overly complicated and convoluted, relying on a dense internal mythology (and a few too many characters) that leads to a lot of exposition and flashbacks that serve to needlessly complicate what is a very straightforward narrative. To be fair, this also gives Koo the opportunity to play genuine emotion to compliment his impressive stunt choreography.

Still, it’s hard to complain too much, when the climax of Twilight of the Warriors builds to a three-on-one showdown against a villain with seemingly impenetrable skin in the middle of a literal cyclone in the middle of a tenement building. What more could you want at 1:30am on a Friday morning, wearing a tuxedo at the world’s most prestigious film festival? Twilight of the Warriors is a great time, and a highlight of the festival so far.