Aha, finally someone to discuss the film with. I think your interpretation is correct. It’s a personal film about being a creator and grappling with his inner demons, the public, and the major institutions. Stopping time in the film is never done as a way to accomplish a tangible goal. It’s always just facilitating a poignant moment of reflection for observers (us, or Julia) by capturing a frame of something fleeting in the world and holding onto it. That’s his superpower.
Julia’s arc is also all about moving past the shallow, self-centered Hollywood socialite life (which, honestly, the film struggles to even satirize since the real world counterpart is almost identically absurd, but Shia does his best!), letting go of her egotism to find passionate work and build a family. I’m sure we can identify parallels there.
It is kinda odd to see how few people in the thread have actually watched it and are discussing the film itself. I realise it wasn't ever going to be a smash hit with people flocking to see it in droves but I don't get why more people here wouldn't at least be curious to see what it's like firsthand after all this time. I know that's what drew me to see it.
Yeh Cesar's ability to stop time isn't something he uses like a superpower. It's more that it gives him a perspective that other people just don't have and that's part of why he's this incredible architect. It's about having an artistic gift and using that to produce something incredible. But, since we also see Cesar pissing people off along the way, it's also about having the drive and self-belief to not only have the vision but to be able to follow through on it. And in that way Megalopolis is kind of about itself. Coppola finally managed the thing that pretty much no one thought he could do and did it through his own sheer force of will. It's his own testament to himself.
I know this picture has been joked about a bit in this thread. But this looks like a guy framing a shot as part of the production process.
Ideally, I could have found a picture of Coppola using a viewfinder since it's a more visually similar tool than a camera but you get the idea. If you want to show someone being an architect then I would have thought the go-to thing would be showing Cesar poring over blueprints yet in this scene with Julia talking to him while he's working he's doing something much more akin to a filmmaker's process.
Like you say, it's about an artist grappling with their own issues, like sex and drug use, as well as the wider societal institutions that an artist has to contend with. Cicero is politics, Crassus is finance. For the artist to achieve what they want they need to engage with those institutions to some degree and that's especially the case if you want to work on a grand scale, whether that be building a city or making a multi-million dollar film. In highlighting Cesar's personal issues I wonder if it's Coppola worrying that his own may overshadow his work.
As well as Julia being initially fairly shallow and full of herself without much to back it up ("I did one year at medical school!") she's also Cicero's daughter and therefore part of the society's political institution. At the end of the film she and Cesar are united in behind a vision and you even have Crassus pledging to support it. So these pillars of society are coming together behind a singular vision for how things can be. It reminds me of how an artist like Wagner, someone who also certainly had personal issues as well as vast talent, talked about how he wanted his work to show a better way for the world to be and something people could unite behind to move forward. Yeh those ideas might be wildly grand and impractical, they're not going to build the greatest opera house in the world just to burn it down after one performance of The Ring Cycle. But maybe these works of art do start the kinds of debates that Cesar talks about society needing and are what unites and pushes us forward. Cesar's actual plan is kept pretty vague outside of "build an amazing city using this amazing material." But I think that like a lot of art it's about what you take from it rather than it telling you what to think. If we have Cesar's great debate then it leads us to ask what does a utopia look like and how do we get there? And maybe that prompting can be a function of great art. We don't just need to accept how things are right now, we can look forward and try to move towards that.
Cesar and Julia's baby is called Sunny Hope, a name which is laughably on the nose for how upbeat and optimistic it is. But we see that Sunny Hope appears to share her father's gift when it comes to time. What we come together to produce, whether that be as a society or the next generation, can be a better version of ourselves. After all, the baby could have just been Francis but instead will be something new and is front and centre in the final shot.
I realise I'm a bit all over the place here. But I'm still turning the film over in my mind and figuring out what I think about it. So maybe I'll have a totally different opinion on what it is about by next week. And perhaps this all got a bit pretentious. But fuck it, if you can't be pretentious about art then what's the point?
Reading your thoughts and writing out my own helps me try and figure out what I think about the film. Because I've got to take the time to try and connect the dots in my head and come up with something that's (at least somewhat) cohesive. It's one of the things I really enjoy about discussing films. Reading other's perspectives and getting a better handle on my own can give me a greater appreciation for the film itself. So thanks for the reply.
Also, can you talk a bit more about what "The Ultimate Experience" involved? How did that play out?
