New Wine, Old Bottles for Coppola

"Making wine and food is my profession," Francis Ford Coppola said this past May during a speaking engagement before a Boston audience, "Making movies is my avocation. Other elderly men play golf. I make art films."

Coppola's 68 now, and coming off about a decade since his last film, The Rainmaker. It's not as if that capable enough Grisham exercise put him in Hollywood's doghouse, as his 1982 One From the Heart had done. "A ten-year sentence," he called that exile, "The lesson was not lost on me that you can get hit by a car."

Coppola's new art film, which he financed himself with the promise of distribution from various European production entities, will see U.S. release form Sony Picture Classics in December. The director has resoundingly praised the company's Michael Barker and Tom Bernard, as well he might, because even with its quite trim cost of around $20 million, it wouldn't seem to be for the masses.

Starring Tim Roth and the distinguished Swiss actor Bruno Ganz (with an uncredited cameo from Matt Damon as--whattya know? --a spook), the film is much given to skeins of philosophical dialog

Shot in Romania with a largely native crew, the film features a static camera (an homage of sorts to the great Japanese director Ozu) and lots of warm yellows and browns. At intervals, the image we see on screen is flipped upside down. "I kept saying, this is a student film," Coppola told a Minnesota college audience (he seemed to be seeing the college theater circuit on his brief tour). He added, "We don't quite know what we're doing, and I made it with that attitude." He also showed the audience a documentary made by his wife Eleanor (recalling her film Hearts of Darkness, about the much more lurid proceedings around Apocalypse Now), called Coda: Thirty Years Later.

The director had given a friend in academe a long-fretted-over script for his Megalopolis (inspired by the story of city planner Robert Moses) and in return been given the philosophical, Borges-inflected novella Youth Without Youth by Romanian historian of religion Mircea Eliade."

The story touched my life," says Coppola with disarming candor in the notes to the film, " Like its leading character, Dominic, I was tortured and stumped by my inability to complete an important work. At 66, I was frustrated. I hadn't made a film in eight years. My businesses were thriving but my creative life was unfulfilled."

Reading the book, he adds, "I loved the way one darned thing after another kept happening."

That's a pretty fair description of his film, which often shows two Tim Roth's in a scene and pushes Alexandra Maria Lara further on the road to international notice that began with her role (alongside Ganz) in Downfall.

Richly abetted by an at times Bernard Herman-esque score by discovery Osvaldo Golijov, the film's complicated story "revolves around the key themes that I most hope to understand better: time, consciousness, and the dream-like basis of reality," says Coppola.

Shot over a lengthy 88 days beginning October 2005 (this reporter tried to book a visit during a trip to sets in Hungary and the Czech Republic, until scheduling became a problem), the film in part revisits the obsessive ness of The Conversation. Just as his Gardens of Stone seemed an attempt to exorcise some of the deeply rooted pain from his son's death in a boating accident in 1986, the film is also in part a prelude to the reportedly somewhat autobiographical Tetro, starring Matt Dillon and set amidst the Italian colony in Buenos Aires (where Coppola's apartment was robbed, with his script and backup files for it part of what was stolen.)

The movie will cause debate; is it the "full meal, satisfying in all departments...personal, sweeping and entertaining" as Barker and Bernard describe it, or a product of what critic Tom Carson proposed several years ago: "Coppola's surfeit of ambitions suggests anxiety, not genius; like Mailer, he often seems to be willing himself into brilliance, acting obsessive and visionary not because he's got vision but because he thinks a great filmmaker should."

What can't be argued is that Coppola has fulfilled the ambition he declared to the Minnesota audience: "The career that I wanted, that I didn't have, was to be a personal filmmaker who wrote his own scripts and made films in an exploratory, experimental way."

(Coppola in La Bombonera Stadium, Argentina, 2007; Photo by Juan Mabromata/AFP/Getty Images)