My favourite moment in George Miller’s 'Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga'—the origin story of Furiosa—is a rather anomalous, tender one, on a tangent from the unrelenting, adrenaline-pumping action that otherwise defines the post-apocalyptic Mad Max universe spread over five films and 45 years now. It’s in the chapter called 'The Stowaway', when Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke) asks Furiosa (Anya Taylor-Joy): “Where do you think you are going?”
He wants to journey along to eventually help her reach her destination, i.e., her home in Green Place of Many Mothers. There’s something incredibly romantic about their unplanned alliance that grows, evolves, and matures throughout the film. You want them to stay as a team to get past the Wasteland even while you want to see Furiosa eventually get home from where she had been abducted as a child by the Biker Horde headed by Dementus (Chris Hemsworth).
The prequel to the brilliant 'Mad Max: Fury Road' (2015), starts out spectacularly. However, while it has you in its grip initially, it gradually loses its way amid marauding tribes, lynch mobs and innumerable chases through the dunes on bikes and other souped-up vehicles. Some moments take your breath away but don’t add up to pack in a wallop.
However, the newest addition to “Western on wheels”, as someone chose to describe the 'Mad Max' franchise to 'Miller', does still show the about-to-be-80 filmmaker on top of his game—imagining and executing the wildest and most frenzied of action set-pieces while maintaining the coherence and inner logic of the world and constantly expanding the horizon of “visual music” as he chooses to describe cinema.
Veterans are out in full strength this year at Cannes with 85-year-old Francis Ford Coppola returning to Cannes 45 years after 'Apocalypse Now'. When he told Cannes about his latest film, the festival didn’t bat an eyelid to put it in the competition. Only that it doesn’t quite seem like a film.
There’s a setting and a story—an imaginary America gone to seed, or as the film itself puts it, “the master of the known world gone kaput”. It is for architect and designer Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver) usher in a change and bring it back to its glory his own way which clashes with the old worldly principles of the conservative mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) even as his daughter Julia (Nathalie Immanuel) can’t get enough of Cesar and remains caught between the two men in her life. Then there’s a cast of who’s who—Jon Voight, Aubrey Plaza, Shua LaBeouf, Dustine Hoffman—personifying the many facets of greed, corruption, entitlement, debauchery, and decadence.
Dedicated to his wife Eleanor, who passed away recently, Megalopolis is like a stream of ideas, wisdom of old age that Coppola wants to dole out to the world, irrespective of whether it wants to listen to him or not. His intentions are quite well taken and comprehended—the critique of the “insatiable appetite for power of a few men”, for instance. But most of the philosophizing gets downright corny and cringe— “When you jump into the unknown, you prove yourself free”, “Only two things are difficult to stare at for long, the sun and your own soul”. On top of it all these ideas remain scattered and fragmented, and the film doesn’t manage to knit them into a cohesive whole.
Speaking of senior citizen legends in Cannes this year, there’s also 77-year-old Paul Schrader’s Oh Canada in which he reunites with his American Gigolo star Richard Gere. Adapted from a novel by Russell Banks, the film is about a filmmaker, Leonard (Gere) on his deathbed, sharing his life, memories, secrets and confidences on film with one of his students, and in the presence of his wife Emma (Uma Thurman), it aims to ground the eternal disjunct between the man and the artiste, his life as opposed to the art. There is the added layer of being an immigrant in Canada. But all of it gets treated in too broad and basic a manner, while the high-voltage stars seem curiously inert and disinterested. An emotionally parched film that leaves one utterly unmoved.