Festival de Cannes 2024, Bird and Megalopolis

Megalopolis team ©YesICannes.com

The 2024 Festival de Cannes competition continues on the Croisette with two superb films: Bird by Andrea Arnold and Megalopolis by Francis Ford Coppola.

Francis Ford Coppola ©YesICannes.com

Festival de Cannes 2024 : the competition for the Palme d’Or saw the screening of Bird by British director Andrea Arnold and Francis Ford Coppola‘s eagerly awaited Megalopolis, which, according to the American director, is the most ambitious project of his career, with a script “rewritten up to 300 times in 40 years”. He won the Palme d’Or in 1974 with The Conversation. Then came the legendary Apocalypse Now, whose copy, tirelessly reworked right up to the last minute, was a masterpiece that earned him a second Palme d’Or in 1979.

Bird ©Atsushi Nishijima

Andrea Arnold, Carrosse d’or

Three-time winner of the Jury Prize at Cannes in 2006 (Red Road), 2008 (Fish Tank) and 2016 (American Honey), British director Andrea Arnold returns to the Croisette in the running for the Palme d’Or with Bird, a film that revives the social realist aspirations of her cinema. Two years after Cow (2022), her documentary interlude depicting the daily life of a dairy cow, Bird – Andrea Arnold’s fifth feature film – tells the story of Bailey (Nykiya Adams), a 12-year-old girl living with her father Bug (Barry Keoghan) and brother Hunter (Jason Buda) in a squat in North Kent. Her gloomy life changes when she meets Bird, a young man played by Franz Rogowski. Andrea Arnold was awarded the Carrosse d’or for lifetime achievement at the Quinzaine des Cinéastes.

@Caesar Films

Megalopolis, the future of humanity

Francis Ford Coppola, one of the 20th century’s most talented filmmakers, returns to the Croisette in Competition for the first time since his masterpieces The Conversation and Apocalypse Now, which won the Palmes d’Or in 1974 and 1979 respectively. With an extremely rich film-sum, according to him the “best work” of almost six decades of career. With audiences almost certain to see a film that will go down in history. And yet, despite the seven-minute standing ovation at the official screening, the more than 100 million dollars self-funded by mortgaging its vineyards, its futuristic “peplum” is looking like a fable, depicting a New Rome in decline, a metaphor for an ailing America, and leaves the audience dubious, with all due respect to this immense auteur…

@Caesar Films

Empires on the brink

The parallel is drawn between contemporary America and Ancient Rome, two empires on the brink of collapse, with their rich people insolently decadent and their poor people destitute and angry at the destruction of their homes to build the city of the future: Megalopolis. Based on “Megalon”, a material with magic properties, a promise of a radiant future in the service of human happiness. The project comes from an idealistic architect with egalitarian ideas, César Catilina (Adam Driver), who is decried by mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), a fan of concrete; yet the mayor’s daughter Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel) falls in love with César. A powerful banker, Hamilton Crasus (Jon Voight), the architect’s uncle, supports him, but the pushy bimbo Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza), motivated by greed and César’s disappointed mistress, seeks to harm him, as does Clodio Pulcher (Shia Labeouf), the jealous cousin.

@Caesar Films

Utopian philosophical tale

The 85-year-old director has been working on his film for 40 years, and his message is rich – perhaps too much so, alas, hampered by a narrative that is sometimes foggy, even boring, a mise-en-scène that is sometimes pompous, old-fashioned special effects (in the age of AI!…) and the fable turns into a utopian philosophical tale, with the common thread of the passage of time – which the architect, like artists, have the power to stop. In fact, the film stops during the screening, and in front of the astonished audience, a man emerges from the backstage, microphone in hand, and asks César a question on the screen, which César answers. According to Coppola’s wishes, this theatrical effect is to be applied to all screenings of the film throughout the world. Is the idea visionary or megalo?