REEL | Francis Ford Coppola Envisions 'Megalopolis' x TIFF 2024

"Don't let the now destroy the forever!"

Toronto International Film Festival

Much has been made of legendary Italian-American auteur Francis Ford Coppola's long-gestating, self-financed $120-million surrealist art film sci-fi fantasy opus of a dream project, Megalopolis. First conceived in 1983, the wildly ambitious epic's urban idealism reflects a retro-futuristic vision of a major metropolitan city's opulent transformation into a sustainable utopian paradise in response to the visual thematic language of Fritz Lang's 1927 German expressionist dystopian classic, Metropolis.

It stars Adam Driver as a hotshot, time-stopping architect Cesar and Nathalie Emmanuel as his rival Mayor Cicero's (Giancarlo Esposito) daughter in the unsubtlely named New Rome standing in for New York City and referencing the ruinous downfall of Ancient Rome. There's a clear Shakespearan allegory about warring families and factions fighting for the future of their Romanesque city-state nation. Shot by Romanian cinematographer Mihai Mălaimare Jr., Megalopolis' look and feel bridge its theatrical stage-like performances and expressionistic sets with a gorgeous sheen of scenic urban landscapes.

Co-starring Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, Jon Voight, Laurence Fishburne (also the narrator), and many other famous faces as strange archetype characters that run the city, they all offer a widely divergent range of portrayals, varying from theatrical restraint to ham-fisted overacting. Coppola's characters and cast reflect a declining empire's collapse through their greedy conflicts with a rat-tailed LaBeouf, in particular, acting out as a devious Tr*mpian figure power hungry for public adoration and Plaza's delightfully over-the-top theatrics as a scheming ex-lover.

Megalopolis is a hauntingly beautiful meditation on life and politics that directly responds to the current climate of division and manipulation by the powerful elite class. Its messy spectacle of artifice offers a sprawling vision overstuffed with so many ideas and historical references of a decaying superpower in complete disarray. Explicitly labelled as "A Fable" in its title card, Coppola expresses his hopefulness for the future by acknowledging the corruption of the past in the present through the backdrop of modern architectural oppulence.

Megalopolis screened at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival as part of the Gala Presentations program.


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