Francis Ford Coppola’s 140-minute, self-financed magnum opus received a mixed reaction at its Cannes Film Festival premiere on Thursday (16 May).
The Godfather director’s new dystopian drama, Megalopolis, stars Adam Driver as Cesar Catilina, an architect-scientist who wants to better a fictional version of New York City called New Rome.
Journalists present at the screening reported booing from the audience after the film ended. However, the boos quickly turned to cheers when an “In Memoriam” segment proceeded to play for Coppola’s late wife Eleanor, World of Reel’s Jordan Ruimy reported.
The director and cast then received a seven-minute standing ovation.
“Thank you all so much. It is so impossible to find words to tell you how I feel,” Coppola said after the credits rolled, introducing his family members to the audience.
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Megalopolis has divided critics, debuting on the review aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes with a score of 53 per cent at the time of writing.
New York Magazine’s Bilge Ebiri wrote that, at times, the film “feels like the fevered thoughts of a precocious child, driven and dazzled and maybe a little lost in all the possibilities of the world before him”.
At one moment during the film, an actor reportedly appeared on the Cannes stage, playing a journalist, speaking to Cesar on the screen as if he were at a press conference.
My take? It’s like any art/passion film. They’re very rarely universally liked on the usual level of something like the godfather, where even if you don’t like the movie, you recognize how well crafted it is.
I suspect that when it’s available for wider viewing, it’ll be a mixed bag with the usual categories being there, with the majority of casual movie goers being baffled as to what the hell is going on. You’ll have the people that think anything arty is great, you’ll have those that hate arty. There’s always going to be those. And you’ll have the ones that don’t really have a strong reaction, but want to take part in three discussion, so they voice one of those for a little harmless granfallooning.
It’ll probably be one of those movies that film geeks have debates over just for the sake of debating.
Now, I have no idea if it’ll be good or bad on any objective level; not that there’s many ways the be objective about movies other than technical stuff. But I kinda want to see it. Not enough to go to a theater, because that’s a very rare thing for me, but I’ll likely want to see out as soon as it’s available digitally just because of the scale of the process of getting it made. Nobody makes this kind of project without passion, and that means it’ll be at least interesting, even if it sucks.