"Megalopolis", de Francis Ford Coppola (el guión original)

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Un interesante sitio, con muchos otros guiones también...
Los dibujos del storyboard son también originales de Coppola.

Crítica de "Juventud sin juventud, de Francis Ford Coppola (Clarín)

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Francis Ford Coppola: What I've Learned (Esquire)

The 70-year-old director on meeting Gotti, wanting Scorsese to helm Godfather III, ignoring The Sopranos, and more (wine with Bill Cosby, anyone?)

By Stephen Garrett

When I was sixteen or seventeen, I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to be a playwright. But everything I wrote, I thought, was weak. And I can remember falling asleep in tears because I had no talent the way I wanted to have.

Did you ever see Rushmore? I was just like that kid.

I've had wine at the table all my life. Even kids were allowed to have it. We used to put ginger ale or lemon soda in it.

I did something terrible to my father. When I was twelve or thirteen, I had a job at Western Union. And when the telegram came over on a long strip, you would cut it and glue it on the paper and deliver it on a bicycle. And I knew the name of the head of Paramount Pictures' music department — Louis Lipstone. So I wrote, "Dear Mr. Coppola: We have selected you to write a score. Please return to L. A. immediately to begin the assignment. Sincerely, Louis Lipstone." And I glued it and I delivered it. And my father was so happy. And then I had to tell him that it was fake. He was totally furious. In those days, kids got hit. With the belt. I know why I did it: I wanted him to get that telegram. We do things for good reasons that are bad.

People feel the worst film I made was Jack. But to this day, when I get checks from old movies I've made, Jack is one of the biggest ones. No one knows that. If people hate the movie, they hate the movie. I just wanted to work with Robin Williams.

I was never sloppy with other people's money. Only my own. Because I figure, well, you can be.

Ten or fifteen years after Apocalypse Now, I was in England in a hotel, and I watched the beginning of it and ultimately ended up watching the whole movie. And it wasn't as weird as I thought. It had, in a way, widened what people would tolerate in a movie.

I saw this bin full of, basically, garbage film. We had shot five cameras when the jets came and dropped the napalm. You had to roll them all at the same time, so there was a lot of this leader, which was just footage. So I picked something out of this barrel and put it in the Moviola and it was very abstract, and every once in a while you saw this helicopter skid. And then over in sound there was all this Doors music, and in it was something called "The End." And I said, "Hey, wouldn't it be funny if we started the movie with 'The End'?"

I have more of a vivid imagination than I have talent. I cook up ideas. It's just a characteristic.

I just admire people like Woody Allen, who every year writes an original screenplay. It's astonishing. I always wished that I could do that.

To do good is to be abundant — that's my tendency. If I cook a meal, I cook too much and have too many things. I was just watching a Cecil B. DeMille picture last night based on Cleopatra, and I realized how many parts of the real story he left out. So much of the art of film is to do less. To aspire to do less.

When I was starting out, I got a job writing a script for Bill Cosby. He used to have the very best wine for his friends. He didn't drink wine himself, but he had this wine called Romanée-Conti, which is considered one of the greatest wines in the world. I never knew wine could taste like that. He also taught me how to play baccarat. And one night I had $400, and I won $30,000. So I bought $30,000 worth of Romanée wines.

You have to view things in the context of your life expectancy.

The ending was clear and Michael has corrupted himself — it was over. So I didn't understand why they wanted to make another Godfather.

I said, "What I will do is help you develop a story. And I'll find a director and produce it." They said, "Well, who's the director?" And I said, "Young guy, Martin Scorsese." They said, "Absolutely not!" He was just starting out.

The only thing they really argued with me about was calling it Godfather Part II. It was always Son of the Wolfman or The Wolfman Returns or something. They thought that audiences would find it confusing. It was ironic, because that started the whole numbers thing. I started a lot of things.

I was in my trailer, working on Godfather II or III in New York, and there was a knock on the door. The guy working with me said that John Gotti would like to meet Mr. Coppola. And I said, "It's not possible, I'm in the middle of something." There's an old wives' tale about vampires — that you have to invite them in, but once they cross the threshold, then they're in. But if you say you don't want to meet them, then they can't come in. They can't know you.

I never saw The Sopranos. I'm not interested in the mob.

What greater snub can you get than that absolutely nobody went to see Youth Without Youth? Anything better than that is a success.

Some audiences love to sit there and see all the names in the credits. Are they looking for a relative?

What should I do now? I could do something a little more ambitious. Or less. Better less. For me, less ambitious is more ambitious.

Turin to fete Kusturica, American Zoetrope (Variety)

ROME -- The Turin Film Festival will be feting helmer Emir Kusturica and Francis Ford Coppola's production company, American Zoetrope, during its upcoming 27th edition.

Kusturica will be on hand to receive Turin's new "8 1/2" nod, inspired by Federico Fellini's influential pic. The Sarajevo-born two-time Cannes Palme d'Or winner will bring previously unseen outtakes of his "Time of the Gypsies" and "Arizona Dream," and an eight-hour-plus director's cut of "Underground."

Coppola, who is also a two-time Palme d'Or winner, is expected in Turin to pick up a "8 1/2" nod, awarded to American Zoetrope, and for the Italo preem of his latest work "Tetro," to be released in Italy by BIM.

The fest, headed this year by auteur Gianni Amelio, will also screen Coppola's "Rumblefish," and a freshly restored print of 1948 classic "The Red Shoes," by British directorial duo Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, a film that Coppola pays homage to in "Tetro."

The fest, which is dedicated to indie cinema, will run Nov. 13-21.

"Tetro" Featurette - Cinematography

Breve "featurette" (como le dicen) sobre la fotografía de "Tetro". No luce nada mal...

"Tetro", de Francis Ford Coppola (U.S. Box Office)

On 2 screens, “Tetro” - based around the troubles of an Italian-American family living in Argentina - grossed $38,169. Its $19,084 average places it well above Coppola’s last effort, 2007’s “Youth Without Youth,” which averaged only $4,758 from 6 screens. As the film expands and initial curiosity wains, the mildly received “Tetro” might struggle to keep up a promising pace. While outgrossing “Youth”‘s $244,397 seems all but assured, recouping its $15 million budget does not.

Publicidad de "Tetro": ¿no será mucho?

Aviso publicitario de "Tetro" en Los Angeles Times: o comprás una entrada o comprás un vino. ¿Habrá descuento por las dos cosas?

Sons and the Father Who Made Them ("Tetro" review, The New York Times)

By Manohla Dargis

It is tempting to see Francis Ford Coppola’s latest work — “Tetro,” a visually lush cinematic fugue about love, ambivalence and two brothers fleeing the dark shadow of their domineering father, a world-famous conductor — through the lens of autobiography. But like much of this movie, the lens appears clouded. Mr. Coppola’s father, Carmine, who died in 1991, was a rather less celebrated musician, best known for some of the scores for his youngest son’s films, including “The Godfather: Part II” and “Apocalypse Now.” Then again, the ravenous, larger-than-life patriarch in “Tetro” could also be a self-portrait of the director.

Certainly the intense passions between brothers is a theme that Mr. Coppola has visited before, in the first two “Godfather” movies, with their instances of symbolic and literal fratricide, and in the autobiographically inflected “Rumble Fish,” which he dedicated to his older brother, August. “Tetro” largely turns on the relationship between a 17-year-old, Bennie (the fine newcomer Alden Ehrenreich), and his much older brother, the anguished title character (Vincent Gallo, decoratively sullen), a cosmopolitan type who’s fled his homeland (fatherland) for an old-fashioned bohemian existence in Buenos Aires marked by late mornings, café idylls, colorful characters and erotic pleasures. These latter needs seem mainly provided by his live-in lover, Miranda (Maribel Verdú), a vague, warm presence who embodies the sensual and the maternal.

Bennie stumbles into Tetro’s world as if into a dream, one Mr. Coppola has summoned up with great visual beauty. The movie was shot in widescreen in lustrous black-and-white digital video with bursts of color by Mihai Malaimare Jr., the cinematographer for Mr. Coppola’s previous feature, “Youth Without Youth.” (“Rumble Fish” was also shot in black and white with splashes of color.) Mr. Coppola has cited Elia Kazan’s films like “On the Waterfront” as one inspiration for his new movie’s striking, high-contrast visuals, an influence that also reverberates in the brooding tensions between the brothers who at times bring to mind those in Kazan’s “East of Eden.” While shooting “The Godfather,” it seems worth mentioning, Mr. Coppola had nightmares that he was going to be replaced by Kazan.

The Oedipal angle in “Tetro” kicks in as soon as Bennie enters Tetro’s apartment, where an image of Robert Mitchum from “The Night of the Hunter” — the words love and hate tattooed on his hands — glowers down from a wall. The family theme echoes even here; in that eccentric 1955 classic, Mitchum plays a preacher who tracks the two children of a woman he’s married and murdered. The patriarchal damage in Mr. Coppola’s movie is somewhat subtler, the work of a man, Carlo Tetrocini (Klaus Maria Brandauer), who has crippled the dreams of his own brother, another composer (Mr. Brandauer, heavily disguised), and the sanity of his older son. Tetro may have renounced his father, but he can’t shake him in spirit or name.

And so, much like Mr. Coppola’s own filmmaking past, the old man looms. Hollywood haunts “Tetro” just as Carlo haunts his sons. Eschewing the inexorable forward thrust of most contemporary studio products, Mr. Coppola, working from his own screenplay — his first original one since “The Conversation” in 1974 — drifts and circles around his themes much as Bennie and Tetro amble around town. Tetro, we discover, is a genius or would be if he ever completed his work, an aside that’s funny and tragic though it’s unclear if it’s meant to be both. One of the many themes that surfaces, elliptically if stubbornly, is the pressure family exerts on genius or maybe vice versa, a topic that’s imprinted on the Coppola Family Saga.

A story of sorts emerges, though mostly what rises to the fore are moods and feelings and the heavy silences that drive wedges among even the closest of intimates. The sense of heaviness is partly due to the dark imagery as well as the intentionally artificial, somewhat leaden sound work by Walter Murch, Mr. Coppola’s longtime editor and sound guru. Resolutely nonrealistic — or, rather, nongeneric Hollywood — the audio adds greatly to the movie’s unreality, to the sense that we’re watching (experiencing) someone else’s dream or nightmare. Every word of dialogue and chair scrape sounds as if it had been separately recorded and the usual atmospheric noise — the ambient filler that gives movies their spark of artificial life — has gone provocatively missing.

Life meets art meets family meets film in “Tetro,” sometimes powerfully, sometimes obscurely. Filled with incidents (a well-timed broken leg, a production of “Faust”) and diversions (a powerful critic named Alone played with an inscrutable smile by Carmen Maura) and a few glorious peeks at the soaring Patagonian mountains, the movie finds Mr. Coppola stretching beyond the mainstream conventions that have alternately liberated and constrained him for more than four decades of filmmaking. As with “Youth Without Youth,” this new movie feels like a transitional work but also an inspired one, the creation of a director who, having recently turned 70, has set off on a new adventure that requires more from his audiences than some might be willing to give. Which is itself a sign of vigorous artistic renewal.

TETRO

Opens on Thursday in Manhattan.

Written, produced and directed by Francis Ford Coppola; director of photography, Mihai Malaimare Jr.; edited by Walter Murch; music by Osvaldo Golijov; production designer, Sebastián Orgambide. At the Landmark’s Sunshine Cinema, 139-143 East Houston Street, East Village. Running time: 2 hours 7 minutes. This film is not rated.

WITH: Vincent Gallo (Tetro), Alden Ehrenreich (Bennie), Maribel Verdú (Miranda), Klaus Maria Brandauer (Carlo Tetrocini), Carmen Maura (Alone), Rodrigo de la Serna (José), Leticia Brédice (Josefina) and Mike Amigorena (Aberlardo).

"Tetro", de Francis Ford Coppola (Reviews - Part 2)

By J. Hoberman (Village Voice)

As Tetro, Francis Ford Coppola's baroque genealogical melodrama, reaches its appropriately hysterical denouement, Vincent Gallo fixes his pale gaze on young co-star Alden Ehrenreich and reassures him that "it's going to be OK—we're a family." Gallo's warmth is not altogether convincing, but for writer-director Coppola, Tetro is a cri de coeur, one more from the heart.

Step two in Coppola's reinvention as a self-financed, off-Hollywood, personal filmmaker, Tetro is a marked advance over the Faustian, time-travelling absurdity Youth Without Youth (2007). A moody job shot in carefully-framed wide-screen and sumptuous black-and-white chiaroscuro—with a few gaudy color flashbacks—it more than redeems the arty pretention of Coppola's 1984 youth film Rumble Fish, not to mention the dismal clunkers that followed (Cotton Club, Gardens of Stone, Tucker, Godfather III, Dracula, Jack, and The Rainmaker).

Bennie Tetrocini (Ehrenreich), an 18-year-old waiter on a luxury cruise ship, takes shore leave in Buenos Aires, looking for his long-lost older brother Angelo (Gallo), whom he has idealized as a successful writer. Now calling himself Tetro—short for the family name but also Italian for "gloomy"—the exile is holed up in the atmospheric port slum La Boca and is not exactly thrilled to see his baby brother. Gallo makes a fabulous entrance, leg in a cast, wielding his crutch to vent displeasure on the furniture. Willful destruction is the signifier of integrity. Attended by a devoted common-law wife (Maribel Verdú) whom he met in the mental hospital, Tetro is the touchiest of suffering artists. It's tempting to suspect that Gallo wrote his own dialogue and even perhaps Verdú's. "He's like a genius but without a lot of accomplishments," she explains to the avid kid brother.

Tetro is blatantly operatic, but its florid style is organic. Tetro's mother, we learn, was a diva. His father (like Coppola's, albeit to far greater success) is a composer; his uncle (again like Coppola's, if less successfully) is a conductor. Tetro's favorite movie, to which he takes the child Bennie, is Powell and Pressburger's flaming Tales of Hoffmann. These flashbacks allow for some ultra-theatrical inserts—Coppola shows us the dismemberment of Hoffman's dancing doll, Olympia—as does the narrative: Tetro is an unproduced playwright who scribbles cryptic notes to himself and hangs with the Buenos Aires underground and, at one point, operates the lights for (and disrupts) a drag version of Faust.

Meanwhile, snoopy Bennie insinuates himself into his cranky brother's life, enabling Gallo to throw a few choice tantrums, and begins rattling the skeletons in the family closet. Papa Carlo (Klaus Maria Brandauer) is an insanely competitive and manipulative monster who browbeats his younger brother, Alfie (also Brandauer), as well as his eldest son, with the notion that "there is only room for one genius in this family," and is last seen glowering over his own funeral in a Mussolini-scale personality poster. The acting out grows increasingly extravagant on the road to Patagonia, where a formidable drama critic known as Alone (and hilariously swanned by Carmen Maura) has arranged a drama festival to honor the Parricidés movement and perhaps the play that Tetro has secretly written.

Parricide or parody? "What has happened to our family? We were so promising," Tetro's uncle wonders. Coppola, who has scheduled Tetro to open on his father's birthday, has no doubts. Having directed the greatest family saga in Hollywood history, he can be excused for mythologizing his own clan—"Nothing in this movie ever really happened, but it's all true," he told interviewers at Cannes, where Tetro had its premiere—or for inspiring others to do so. There's more than a little baggage in the currently ubiquitous Louis Vuitton ad, a dramatically posed pastoral image of Francis and Sofia, shot by Annie Leibowitz during Tetro's production. Pointing a finger and a pen, the Olympian filmmaker lectures the dutiful daughter sprawled at his feet, one knee coyly raised, in an image suggesting a Renaissance rendering of Jove explaining dramaturgy to Thalia.

Tetro exhibits a similar, self-aggrandizing sort of nutty classicism. Old-fashioned, if not anachronistic, in its aspirations, this is an art film that might have been made in 1965—the period when the UCLA-educated Coppola first broke into production. The presiding deities are Orson Welles, Carol Reed, and early Fellini—the absurdist Roman Polanski of Cul de Sac would be an analogue—although, in interviews, Coppola has been eager to reference Pirandello, Tennessee Williams, and Greek tragedy.

The narrative is a bit labored, but, after decades of far more ponderous efforts, Coppola has found his way home. However overwrought, Tetro is neither a project nor a package; it exudes enthusiasm and love of cinema. Coming from the 70-year-old who once bestrode Hollywood Boulevard like a colossus, Coppola's new movie offers best possible evidence of youth without youth.

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By Andrew Sarris (The New York Observer)

Francis Ford Coppola’s Tetro, from his own screenplay (partially in Spanish with English subtitles), conveys a sense of his own life and career convulsing wildly between fulfillment and tragedy, triumph and debacle. Now 70, Mr. Coppola can look back on an existence drenched with family feelings and vague guilt complexes. These he has expanded and wildly overdramatized in an independent low-budget feature shot on location in the most picturesque and art-drenched neighborhoods in Buenos Aires. He has filmed the present-day scenes in highly contrasted black-and-white, influenced by such B&W classicists as Akira Kurosawa, Michelangelo Antonioni, Elia Kazan and Robert Bresson. For scenes set in the past or as fantasies, he turned to the vivid color palette of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, represented by extensive footage from The Red Shoes (1948) and The Tales of Hoffman (1951). The narrative of two brothers in conflict is suggested by Rumble Fish (1983), which Mr. Coppola adapted from one of S. E. Hinton’s series of young adult novels, with Matt Dillon living in the shadow of older brother Mickey Rourke.

In Tetro, Vincent Gallo plays the title character, the older brother of 18-year-old Aiden Ehrenrich’s younger brother, Bennie. The film begins with Bennie as he arrives in Argentina from the U.S. on a cruise ship on which he worked as a waiter. We soon learn that Bennie is in search of his estranged older brother, who had left his family in the U.S. 11 years before, without a word of explanation. When Bennie finally locates Tetro’s house, he is welcomed very warmly by Tetro’s girlfriend, Miranda (Maribel Verdu), but Tetro himself at first refuses to leave his room to greet Bennie. When he finally does, he advises Bennie to return home as soon as possible. Tetro also refuses to answer Bennie’s plaintive queries as to why, in effect, he abandoned his younger brother. Tetro angrily refuses to discuss the subject. And so it goes, on and on, for an inordinate length of time—Bennie beseeching, Tetro turning away.

In the meantime, Miranda tries her best to bring the two brothers together, without any success. Finally, with Miranda’s help, Bennie gains access to Tetro’s hidden hoard of writings and secrets, and sets out to write his own musical play on what he has discovered. Bennie’s writing, in unwilling collaboration with Tetro, attracts the attention of a very influential critic named Alone (Carmen Maura), who awards Bennie and Tetro the Patagonian Festival Prize, at which ceremony all the family secrets come tumbling out. I would be a spoilsport indeed to reveal them.

Klaus Maria Brandauer’s Carlo appears only in the multicolored past as a disreputable parental figure for Tetro and Bennie. Tetro has already been compelled to relive a traumatic car accident, in which he, the driver, survived, and his and Bennie’s mother, sitting next to him, was killed. Mr. Brandauer’s Carlo is a world-renowned orchestra conductor, and bears a superficial resemblance to Mr. Coppola’s own father, Carmine Coppola, the first flute of Alfredo Toscanini’s NBC Orchestra, and a composer for several of Mr. Coppola’s film projects. In interviews, Mr. Coppola has insisted that his father has always been a supportive presence in his life, and that therefore there is no resemblance between his own benign father and Mr. Brandauer’s coldly, cruelly manipulative Carlo. Still, one may be left to wonder from what source Tetro’s and Mr. Coppola’s overpowering rage toward a father figure originated. Of course, Mr. Gallo’s Tetro delivers much of the actor’s own ever-sour expressions of disgust over a world of unexplained grievances. Mr. Gallo’s own films, Buffalo 66 (1998) and The Brown Bunny (2004), the latter having scandalized Cannes with its notorious fellatio sequence with Chloë Sevigny, project enough angst on their own to supplement Mr. Coppola’s.

Still, despite all its longueurs and extreme aggravations, Tetro deserves to be seen as the late work of one of the cinema’s most accomplished masters of mise-en-scène.

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By Keith Uhlich (Time Out New York)

Is this the one—a long-awaited new classic from the master? Close enough. Tetro expands on the buoyant sensations of writer-director Francis Ford Coppola’s previous film—the origins-of-language love story Youth Without Youth (2007)—even as its twists and turns feel less spontaneous, more pro forma. This is a straight-hewn sins-of-the-father tale (a Coppola old reliable) that is at times dulled by its narrative inevitabilities. But though there’s less improvisatory wonder, it’s a small price to pay for the sight of a revivified artist expressing his lifelong obsessions with supreme control and confidence.

Coppola introduces Tetro (Gallo) gazing intently at an irradiant desk lamp, a sense-stirring bauble that attracts both his deer-in-the-headlights stare and an agitatedly buzzing moth. Sight and sound intermingle, as do past and present—whatever this self-exiled artist is remembering is more than vaguely unpleasant, yet complicated by memory’s haze. Tetro’s subconscious knot is fervently shared with his younger brother, Bennie (Ehrenreich), who has sought out his long-lost sibling while on furlough in Argentina.

Bennie, in his gleaming Querelle-esque sailor suit, is all easily corruptible innocence, but Tetro treats him with a coldness born of harsh experience. The brothers’ highly regarded yet exceedingly cruel composer father, Carlo (Klaus Maria Brandauer), nearly quashed his eldest son’s artistic aspirations. Because of this, Tetro’s rejection of Bennie comes off as a futile attempt to ward off conflict by preserving the younger man’s purity. Yet the blows and betrayals must come—this is a Coppola film, after all. The conduit is Tetro’s unfinished autobiographical novel, written in code and hidden away in a battered suitcase, which Bennie discovers and takes upon himself to complete.

Coppola excels at what might be termed the cinema of inadequacy. His great theme is the failure of a given era’s generational elite to live up to the examples of their forebears, however reprehensible the accomplishments. Carlo bedevils his son like Mr. Scratch does Daniel Webster, but he’s only part of a much larger problem. It’s the arts themselves that weigh on Tetro, from the aria that his mother (Adriana Mastràngelo) sings in the final moments of her life to the Powell-Pressburger film (The Tales of Hoffman) that he watches with Bennie in more stable times.

Gallo’s soft, breathy voice and hunched, heroin-chic frame belie the unpredictable intensity that simmers just out of sight. He’s the perfect performer to realize Coppola’s intentions. It’s frightening when this hollow-eyed thespian erupts, but he’s even more daunting in silence, when merely looking about, as he does here, with a potent mixture of awe and uncertainty.

His character’s journey is mostly one of retreat, of movement away from the blinding glare of the divine to the more private, darkened spaces of the self. It all comes back to light: Whether emanating from a common desk lamp or glimmering off the reflective Patagonia mountains, light is Tetro’s mock-mystical albatross. It teases and tortures him, promises revelation where none can be had—a fascinating reversal-cum-perversion of cinema’s tendency toward redemption and illumination. This often rugged struggle is mirrored in Mihai Malaimare’s simultaneously attractive and repellent hi-def cinematography, which shifts between a widescreen black-and-white present of deceptive luminosity and a window-boxed–color past heavy with murky grain.

Tetro is hyperengaged with this tactile world around him, but he slowly comes to realize that there is little satisfaction and even less comfort to be had in his artistic and familial experiences. This is an awareness that Coppola himself has attained, having had his fair share of peaks and valleys in both life and career. Some have called Tetro a return to form, but it’s more the work of a man who has gone over the proverbial edge and lived to tell about it. Much like Tetro and Bennie in the film’s final scene, Coppola has been swallowed whole by darkness and yet attained a necessary clarity that may otherwise have evaded him. It could be said, strangely enough, that the abyss was never so enlightening.

"Tetro", de Francis Ford Coppola (Reviews - Part 1)

Karina Longworth (SpoutBlog)

“What has happened to our family? We were so promising!”

So ponders one elder member of the artistic clan at the center of Francis Ford Coppola’s Tetro –– and so, one imagines, the film’s detractors will be eager to snark about the director and his filmmaking progeny. FFC is oft-mocked for having whored himself out to studios in the 90s, only to squander the generosity of an indie arm with his pretentious “return to personal filmmaking,” 2007’s Youth Without Youth. As for the younger Coppola generation, Roman went from making highly-cinematic music videos to directing the promising mod homage CQ, but has since apparently done little but shoot second until for his dad, sister and Wes Anderson. After winning an Oscar for the beyond-slight Lost in Translation, Sofia Coppola made a personal gesture of her own with the masterfully stylish Marie Antoinette — which subsequently dropped her from the favor of much of the critical class.

Marie Antoinette is a useful film to talk about in the same breath as Tetro, not because they’re similar in terms of means of production (they’re not: the former was a studio-funded biopic banked on North American stars that was considered a disappointment when it failed to build on Lost’s box office and awards tally, the latter a self-financed, self-distributed late-career experiment that can substantively please or disappoint only its maker), but because the finished projects nonetheless share a common DNA. Both films are so drunk on the melding of disparate cultural references (for the daughter, corset porn and Gang of Four; for the father, partner dance musicals and Fellini) that they read as dewy confessions from the filmmaker, feature-length love letters to their own aesthetics, the specific things they personally think are beautiful.

Tetro follows the reunion of Bennie (teen Leonardo DiCaprio lookalike Alden Ehrenreich), an 18 year old military school dropout-turned-cruise ship waiter, and his much older brother (Vincent Gallo), a once-promising writer who has cut off all ties with his Italian-American, New York-based family and established a new life in Beunos Aires. Calling himself Tetro (a bastardization of the family name and the Italian word for “gloomy”), when Bennie shows up at his door and is reluctantly given a couch to sleep on the older brother is living with long-suffering girlfriend Miranda (Maribel Verdu), running lights at a local theater, and has abandoned his plays and poetry. In an effort to uncover Tetro’s secrets, Bennie snoops and discovers his brother’s unfinished masterwork, a play about his relationship with their world-famous conductor father (Klaus Maria Brandauer) and Bennie’s dancer mother. When an accident leaves Bennie bedridden for a stretch, Miranda smuggles Bennie the scraps of Tetro’s abandoned opus, and the younger man sets out to restore his family’s creative legacy.

Though Tetro is too frenzied a film to be made or broken by a single performance, its star delivers unexpected pleasures. Love him or hate him, nobody says “Go ahead, put your pants on,” quite like Vincent Gallo. The odd combo of intensity and antipathy, smirk and menace. And yet, Tetro grounds Gallo’s talents in something like classical character acting. The movie makes you wish he’d take more roles that are motivated by something other than the relationship between his ego and his dick.

For the first half of Tetro, the characters have a bad habit of saying aloud what they actually mean; as soon as there’s a hint of subtext, somebody kills it by verbalizing it. But once the first act is out of the way, and the action of the black-and-white present day (if you can call it that — despite the presence of a cell phone or two, there’s little evidence Coppola is describing the world as it exists today) becomes increasingly twinned with Technicolor dance sequences and hazy memories in the palette of a sun-baked Polaroid, Coppola gets more visual with his exposition. Elements that initially grate are eventually boiled down into dream logic. Widescreen compositions increasingly include shadows and/or reflections, spotlights seem plentiful even when the action is off stage. The sometimes uninspired dialogue and mostly trite plot twists recede into the background, serving as a skeleton to support pure-cinema expressionism. Coppola seems to find the greatest clarity in his use of the ultimate cinema expressionism, filmed dance.

More than anything else, Tetro feels like a certain type of Vincente Minnelli musical — not An American in Paris, but The Pirate, or even better, Yolanda and the Thief. Visually sumptuous, with a script that vacillates between sufficient and insipid but is rendered virtually irrelevant by long, extra-narrative fantasy and/or scenes, which recast the whole of the narrative as taking place in the filmmaker’s dreams – and maybe destined to be hated upon its release. Those Minnelli films were eventually reclaimed by French critics and academics. In The Time-Image, Gilles Deleuze waxes rhapsodic on the ability of dance in Minnelli’s films to offer an uncanny “passage between worlds.” This seems like the best way to understand Tetro: as a vehicle for transit between our world, in which Vincent Gallo is more than anything else a auteur of the art punchline who sells his sperm for seven figures — to white women only — on the Internet, and the world inside Francis Ford Coppola’s memory. There, the clock is stopped somewhere in the mid-60s, before he’s made his own significant films, the viral irony and collapsing of context that came with the Internet never happened, and Vincent Gallo is a romantic hero.

The tricky business with this kind of filmmaking is that it reads to most casual viewers as narcissism, and in the case of Tetro, there may not be a valid argument that the haters are wrong on that front. But history tends to remember narcissism well and as densely layered, intensely visual work of creative autobiography, Tetro claims a key place in the Coppola filmography. At least, for the first time in the last few decades worth of filmography, it feels like it’s got somewhere to take you.

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Nick Roddick (The Evening Standard, London)

A two-hours-plus saga of family fortunes set across several decades and two countries — but mainly in present-day Argentina — Francis Ford Coppola’s Tetro is huge in its ambition, frequently operatic in its style and, on balance, impressive in its achievement.

Young Benjamin (newcomer Alden Ehrenreich, excellent) turns up in Buenos Aires in search of his much older brother, Angelo (Vincent Gallo, as brooding as ever but kept on a firm leash by Coppola).

Angelo fled the family home under mysterious circumstances many years ago and has renamed himself Tetro. He now lives with Miranda (Maribel Verdú, in the film’s standout performance) and wants nothing to with his family. Why this is takes Coppola the rest of the film to explain.

The father (Klaus Maria Brandauer, seen in flashback) is a famous musician, as is his brother. This is Coppola’s background, too, and some of the scenes have more than a hint of autobiography. But, said the director afterwards, while “nothing in the film actually happened, everything is true”.

Coppola’s films have always been made up of passages of brilliance interspersed with moments of surprising clumsiness and Tetro is no exception.

But while in masterworks such as Godfather Part II and Apocalypse Now, the brilliance carried all before it, here the two are more evenly matched. The concluding section, set during a risible arts festival in Patagonia, nudges the absurd.

Coppola’s storyline is also problematic. While the family conflicts are firmly in the tradition of Eugene O’Neill and Arthur Miller, the film, structured around a series of car accidents, moves forward according to Coppola’s masterplan rather than any intrinsic logic.

But the key scenes between Ehrenreich, Gallo and Verdú, shot in ravishing digital black-and-white by Mihail Malaimare. For all its faults, Tetro shows what Youth Without Youth cast into doubt: that Coppola is still a great film-maker, even if he cannot always sustain the greatness.

Family Dynamics, Without the Bullets (The New York Times)

Mirala a la Sofia Gala, che... Moria se debe estar muriendo de envidia.

By LARRY ROHTER

FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA turned 70 a couple of months ago, but he shows no sign of slowing down. After a frustrating decade with nary a directing credit to his name, now comes “Tetro,” which is his second movie in two years and is based on the first original screenplay he has written, directed and produced since “The Conversation” in 1974.

“I view this as the second film of my second career,” Mr. Coppola said late last month, shortly after returning from Cannes, where “Tetro” was described by European critics as somewhat uneven but intriguing, emotional and elegiac. “From now on I’m always going to be writing the scripts, and every film will be personal. I’m going to be the kind of filmmaker I wanted to be when I was beginning.”

“Tetro” (which opens on Friday), with Vincent Gallo in the title role, covers some of the same territory, albeit from a different direction, that has fascinated Mr. Coppola since the time of the “Godfather” trilogy, which first made his reputation and his fortune. Once again he has filmed a drama about an Italian immigrant family in conflict, here called the Tetrocinis.

This time, however, the patriarch in question, played by Klaus Maria Brandauer, is a tyrannical orchestra conductor, and his sons are writers, not gangsters. And to the extent there is violence, it is emotional rather than physical, the product of a plot that revolves around a younger brother’s attempt to find and reconcile with an estranged sibling (Mr. Gallo’s character) who has broken with the family and fled.

Because Mr. Coppola’s father, Carmine, was a musician, a flutist who played for Toscanini in the NBC Orchestra before trying his luck as a composer and conductor, there is an obvious temptation to regard “Tetro,” which in Italian means “gloomy” or “glum,” as autobiographical. Suggestions to that effect have already surfaced, but Mr. Coppola said that was not really the case.

“Granted that classical music was part of my life, but my father was a wonderful and talented man who didn’t get his break in life until much later and was nothing like the monster portrayed here,” he said. “Clearly I ran away from military school when I was 15 and idolized my brother. But everything ends at that. My family was far from what you see here. We didn’t have the kinds of rifts, the terrible things that ‘Tetro’ has.”

“My story is more in the league of Tennessee Williams writing Blanche DuBois as an expression of his own vulnerability,” he added. “I think I am all the characters, but the kid is who I was. That’s my story.”

“Tetro” was made in Argentina, mostly in Buenos Aires in the bohemian neighborhood of La Boca, with other scenes shot in Patagonia. Both locales, the one brightly colorful and the other spectacularly imposing, are unfamiliar to most Americans, but Mr. Coppola chose to film in black and white, in part because he wanted to evoke the mood of movies he admires, Visconti’s “Rocco and His Brothers” and Elia Kazan’s “On the Waterfront” in particular.

That choice, especially coming after the mixed reception that greeted the release of his abstract and unconventional “Youth Without Youth” in 2007, also underlines Mr. Coppola’s determination to make the films he wants the way he wants and to avoid any situation in which he has to cede control to others. His long and uneasy relationship with Hollywood is over, he said, acknowledging that it would be difficult these days for him to get a green light from a studio for any project that interests him.

“My attitude is, ‘Who cares about them?’ ” he said. “It’s an industry that just makes the same movie over and over again and rules out a climate of experimentation.”

Audiences are part of the problem too, he argues, because they have lost their sense of adventure and curiosity. “After two generations of television they are even more anxious to see things that are familiar to them, like kids who want to hear the same stories over and over again.”

On the set of “Tetro,” cast members said, the atmosphere was more like that of a low-budget indie film than of a Hollywood production. There were no trailers, even for the stars, and Mr. Coppola was constantly experimenting with ideas that had just occurred to him, often singing songs to keep the mood relaxed and playful.

The Spanish actress Carmen Maura appears in “Tetro” in the brief but crucial role of Tetro’s former mentor, an imperious critic with the power to make or destroy an artist’s career. She has worked with distinguished directors like Pedro Almodóvar, Carlos Saura, Amos Gitai and Fernando Trueba but said that Mr. Coppola had a style she had not encountered before.

“It was an amusing and entertaining experience,” she said. “He’s a completely different kind of director. I liked his craziness. He was very friendly, simpatico and respectful, but you never know what he is going to ask, and he was full of surprises.”

Mr. Coppola has a history of finding and nurturing the talent of young actors. “The Outsiders,” his 1983 ensemble piece, is perhaps the best example: it provided breakout roles for Matt Dillon, Tom Cruise, Patrick Swayze, Rob Lowe, Emilio Estevez, Ralph Macchio, C. Thomas Howell and Diane Lane.

“Tetro” offered a similar opportunity to Alden Ehrenreich, who was 17 when he was cast and has just completed his freshman year at New York University. He had never appeared in a feature-length film before but after five months of auditions won the role of Bennie Tetrocini, who journeys to Buenos Aires in an effort to reconnect with his brother.

“The atmosphere Francis creates around him is extremely warm, inviting and collaborative,” Mr. Ehrenreich said when asked to explain Mr. Coppola’s success with young actors. “It’s like he provides the map, but you find what countries you want to visit. He doesn’t give you a specific laundry list, he invites you into the environment, and you decide how to interact.”

For the Spanish actress Maribel Verdú, who plays Miranda, Tetro’s girlfriend and Bennie’s confidante, “Tetro” presented a different kind of challenge. Though she is already known to American audiences for her performances in “Pan’s Labyrinth” and “Y Tu Mamá También,” this was her first role in an English-language film, and going in she was understandably “nervous, worried that I couldn’t do this, wasn’t up to it,” she said. But Mr. Coppola managed to put her at ease immediately.

“I’ve been at this for 25 years, and never before had a director gone to the airport to await me and take me to his home,” she said. “It was a gesture that made me feel comfortable and protected from the start.”

Mr. Coppola said he perceived a kinship between “Tetro” and “Rumble Fish,” his only other black and white film, which he shot in tandem with “The Outsiders.” “I see ‘Tetro’ as more of a personal drama” than many of his previous works, he said, “a sibling to ‘Rumble Fish’ in that it is the story of a kid who idolizes his brother.”

Nevertheless Ms. Verdú’s role provides the glue that holds the movie together, he said. Or as she explained it, “From the start he was clear in telling me that I had to provide the heart, to bring a bit of light between these two brothers and their tormented relationship.”

Mr. Gallo did not respond to requests for an interview. But Ms. Verdú, who was in Cannes with Mr. Coppola, said the director appeared grateful for and was energized by the warm personal reception he received. And Mr. Coppola said that, because he was too busy and too worried to enjoy the acclaim that accompanied “The Godfather” films, he intends now to savor every opportunity that comes his way.

“I don’t have a lot of time left, but I’m so in love with the cinema that I want to learn all I can about making movies,” he said. “I just want to write another screenplay and make another movie.”

A Conversation with Francis Ford Coppola (Village Voice)

On film (it's over), critics (can be lazy), and marriage (it's tough to be his wife)

By Aaron Hillis

Out from under the $25 million debt incurred from self-financing Apocalypse Now and One From the Heart, and so no longer seduced by Hollywood moolah, 70-year-old wine mogul—and, oh, yeah, legendary filmmaker—Francis Ford Coppola returns to his early indie roots with the self-released, black-and-white, and breathtaking Oedipal drama Tetro, which opens next week and is his first original screenplay since 1974's The Conversation. Vincent Gallo and newcomer Alden Ehrenreich star as brothers Tetro and Bennie, who reunite in present-day Buenos Aires, both estranged from each other, their world-renowned conductor father, and themselves. I drove upstate to meet Coppola at a quaint Rhinebeck inn, where he was staying (for his granddaughter's college graduation) with, appropriately, a very large segment of the Coppola clan.

You were first invited to Cannes 40 years ago with a little independent film, The Rain People, and now you've just returned from the Directors' Fortnight, again with a relatively small indie.

I always wanted to make more personal films, and usually in the film business, the bigger the budget, the more mainstream and middlebrow it has to be. The more modest the budget, the more leeway you have to make a personal expression, which might be successful, or it might be [successful] eight years after it's made. A lot of works of art are not appreciated in their moment, and later on, they grow in prestige. I always chuckle when people say, "You probably won't be able to make the kind of successes you made when you were younger. How do you feel about that?" I just shrug. Shy of The Godfather, most of my films were not really, in their day, successful.

Shooting Tetro (and 2007's Youth Without Youth) in HD certainly helps lower costs, but shouldn't a filmmaker of your generation—not to mention stature—be a purist about film?

I love that young people want to hold on to film as long as they can. It's been with us for the hundred years of cinema, but it's really over now. The new digital medium can be beautiful, but it's really the lens and photographer that make the image beautiful. My daughter [Sofia] won't shoot on anything but film, and I love that about her. Film is more emotional in a way because it's all jiggly, and it gets scratched. [Laughs.] You see that it's film. It's like vinyl. But every movie today—unless it's a really low-budget one and can't afford to—is digital. Some are shot on film and converted, all the traditional post-production balancing and color is done digitally, and they put it out as film. I would guess that within six years, every projector is going to be electronic. We used to shoot 8mm black-and-white, and then, all of a sudden, you couldn't buy it anymore. So I consider this like my second career, and this is my second film.

Why did you decide to self-distribute Tetro?

The distributor screening process is trickier than you think because you have to show it to everyone. They want you to show it to them separately and first, but then if they don't take it, they all know, and the other guy doesn't want to take it. Independent films all come out in October, if you notice, so I wanted it to come out early in the year. I just booked the theaters, and that made us a distributor because we said, "OK, it's coming out. Eight cities. June 11." That decision was made three months ago. The film wasn't even finished. In the summer, you have a choice to see the Tom Hanks movie, or Wolverine, or God-knows-whatever the big movie is, and for that percentage that might want to see a more personal film, hopefully they'll come. It's funny, when you [release] a movie, it's like turning the shower on in a hotel you haven't stayed at. The water either comes out with all this pressure, or just dribble, dribble, dribble.

Tetro is my favorite film of the year thus far, but the reviews have been mixed. What do critics mean to you these days?

For me, the role of the critic is to teach me how I can make the next one better. I realize what my flaws are. I could learn a lot from my daughter because she's very economical, and I tend not to be. There are obviously good critics and bad critics—who, just because the movie isn't like anything they've seen, immediately call it a "muddled mess." If you do a Google search for "muddled mess," you'll see that that's the common phrase they use when they don't want to come out and say what's muddled about it. People are a little bit like sheep, and unable to accept or take anything to heart unless they can link it to something that was successful before. This young kid, Alden, is very talented, and right away, he's "like Leonardo DiCaprio." If a movie comes out and it's really fresh and new, it's not like anything else. What's Punch-Drunk Love like? It's unique. It's a work of art.

Tetro's father, much like The Godfather, is a bigger-than-life patriarch who casts a long shadow. How aware are you of your own shadow with your filmmaking children?

I always had a policy when I was lucky enough to have kids that, if I was going away for two weeks, I'd take them out of school. They were with me all through my career. Obviously, in the Philippines [for Apocalypse Now], there's nothing else to do but play on the set, so they all learned about movies the same way as if we had been a circus family. I'm sure I can't know the difficulties of having me for a father from the point of view of a young person who wants to do similar work. I never said, "You don't want to do that—you gotta do this." I was happy when my kids expressed a love of movies. When my two little boys were 12 or so, they were the co-producers of Rumble Fish. I always elevated them, but if you talk to my son, he might say, "Oh, the guy's a nightmare." I don't think so, but I don't think I can know. I immediately saw Sofia's talent at a very young age. I made her first couple of films possible, and protected her. My son, Roman, when he did the second unit on Dracula, he made all those beautiful, in-camera optical effects. I gave him that responsibility.

More difficult is my wife, because she has many ambitions and talents, but who's going to be my wife? Who's going to fix the house up and make it nice? It's more difficult with a wife because there becomes a job vacancy if your wife is going to go off and become an artist. Who's going to be the wife? We both need one. I'll do the cooking, but who's going to worry about the household and stuff? That's been a very big, frustrating aspect. I've been married 46 years, and it's never been resolved.

Check out next week's Village Voice for J. Hoberman's review of Tetro

Entrevistas con Scorsese, Coppola (The Guardian podcast)

Link

Lo venden como una entrevista con Coppola y Scorsese y me ilusioné con encontrar algo bastante inusual. En realidad, es una entrevista con uno primero, con el otro después, y el "podcast" sigue con más entrevistas de audio. De cualquier manera, es interesante. Lo de Scorsese es básicamente sobre "Las zapatillas rojas" ("The Red Shoes"), que él llevó restaurada a Cannes. Y Coppola habla de "Tetro", obviamente...

Coppola: Auteur Aspiring to be an Amateur (IndieWire)

Tears and tales from one of Hollywood’s biggest directors, in front of a standing room only crowd, was a highlight for many yesterday at the Cannes Film Festival. The director talked about everything from animation, films of the past, the politics of Hollywood, self-distribution, and to of course his latest two releases “Youth Without Youth” and “Tetro” (which opened the Director’s Fortnight section here in Cannes.)

Coppola discussed how he felt about Hollywood films today that are made from a “formula”. Movies are repetitions of similar stories that made money in the past. Anything with emotion, or which is unique or artistic isn’t sought after by Hollywood. He said, “We’re in a commercial dictatorship, that the movie has to make money.” I think many agree this is a rule in Hollywood, which is why he set out to make his own films, with his own funds. Coppola decided to start the journey with “Youth Without Youth” and “Tetro,” but first he needed to tap into his emotional side…which he surely did.

The director said he wanted to make films with emotion and asked himself, “What makes me emotional?” The answer was…family. Coppola recounted many stories during the conversation, moderated by Scott Foundas at the American Pavilion, about his personal and family life, getting choked up on occasion with memories of his family and sister-in-law. His family brought the emotional side out of him and allowed him to make the movies he wanted, even writing the script. When he was young, he said, he “wanted to be the person who wrote his movie, went off and made it. I never imagined being a bigtime director.”

Francis Ford Coppola started out as a screenwriter and revised, rewrote, or adapted stories for others. The movie “Patton” was one of his first screenwriting ventures. After writing the screenplay they decided to go in a different direction, fired him, and shelved his script. Six years later it was dusted off and made into the film we know today. He told up-and-coming filmmakers to take heart from this story, reminding them that “the things you get fired for are the same things you get lifetime achievement awards for later on.”

Coppola encouraged fellow screenwriters in the room to do as he did. “When I write six pages I turn them over and never read them…Young writers have a hormone that makes them hate their writing.” He also suggested to “write in the mornings” as that’s what he does because “no one has hurt my feelings yet.” And he also encouraged screenwriters to exercise…by applying “the seat to the bottom of the chair and start to work cause there’s a lot of procrastination in writing.”

His latest, “Tetro” helped him dive deeper into his emotional ties with his family, Coppola said, as well as allowing him to learn something about himself along the way. Taking liberties with the story he said, “Nothing in ‘Tetro’ ever really happened, but it’s all true.” Many scenes throughout the movie are taken from his real life, but may have a slight variation. One thing he made sure to point out was that his father wasn’t like the father in the movie, “but was a very good man.”

Coppola filmed “Tetro” in Argentina with limited equipment and a smaller than average size crew. He said had a lot of fun during the 63 day shoot, which ironically was the same amount of time it took to shoot “The Godfather,” just without all the machine guns, blown up cars, he pointed out.

The conversation with Coppola was not only enlightening, but educational for those who attended the first in a series of AmPav chats. “Tetro” helped him achieve his H2O factor, he concluded, “Cinema is where writing and acting collide, the H and the O in water.” Without one you can’t have the other and have it be what it was meant to be. Coppola ended the conversation by educating us on the true definition of amateur, stating it’s about real passion for something. Then he declared, “I want to be an amateur filmmaker, because I love films.” While no one probably will ever consider him an amateur at filmmaking, his love for the craft was apparent to all.

"Tetro", de Francis Ford Coppola (Promedio: 4,90)

Quincena de Realizadores

Cristina Nord (Taz, Germany) - 5
Pamela Bienzobas (La Tercera, Chile) - 2
Diego Batlle (La Nación, Otroscines, Argentina) - 6
Luciano Monteagudo (Página/12, Argentina) - 4
Manu Yáñez (Fotogramas, España) - 4
Rudiger Suchsland (Frankfurter Allgemeine, Germany) - 5
Violeta Kovacsics (Lumiere, España) - 4
Roger Alan Koza (La Voz del Interior, Argentina) - 4

Alvaro Arroba (Crítica, Argentina) - 9
Markus Keuschnigg (Die Presse, Austria) - 5
Christoph Hüber (Die Presse, Austria) - 6

Promedio: 4,90


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"Tetro", de Francis Ford Coppola (ScreenDaily)

Dir/scr. Francis Ford Coppola. US-Arg-Sp-It. 2009. 127mins.

A melodramatic family drama set in a Buenos Aires where even innocent passers-by seem consumed by jealousy and passion, Tetro offers glimpses of a golden-age Francis Ford Coppola in his first original script since The Conversation (1974). Although it feels at times like a vanity project, some strong performances – most notably by Spanish actress Maribel Verdu (Y tu mama tambien), but also Vincent Gallo in the title role and newcomer Alden Ehrenreich – save all but Tetro’s most cringeworthy lines.

Tetro goes out domestically on June 11 through Coppola’s American Zoetrope releasing, where its more linear storyline should attract more viewers than Youth Without Youth. Ultimately, Tetro looks likely to become what the French call a succes d’estime in the international marketplace (although audiences in Argentina may react poorly to the film’s tourist trip through their complex social and cultural drives).

Mihai Malaimare’s moody black and white photography, an atmospheric score by Argentinian composer Osvaldo Golijov and long time Coppola collaborator Walter Murch’s editing and sound work help to lift a story that seems at times almost a parody of the dark male family dramas that Coppola’s creativity has always fed on. Indeed, the plot has something of the melodramatic sweep and overwrought tone of an opera libretto.

Ehrenreich plays Bennie, a fresh-faced 17-year-old cruise ship waiter who turns up in Buenos Aires one day in search of his estranged brother Angelo (Gallo). Angelo is a gloomy, broodingly dark poet and playwright who now goes by the name of Tetro (an abbreviation of the family surname Tetrocini, but also an adjective meaning ‘gloomy’ and ‘broodingly dark’ in Italian).

Bennie and Tetro’s father Carlo (Brandauer) is a musician from an Italian émigré family in Argentina, who moved to the States where he is now a famous conductor. He’s also a domineering tyrant whom Tetro despise because of past events which are revealed in a series of flashbacks filmed in colour which rank among the film’s absurder moments.

Tetro, who first appears with his leg in a cast, has given up writing plays and resents the intrusion of his fresh-faced young brother. But, with the help of Tetro’s fiery but kind girlfriend Miranda (Verdu), Bennie decides to help his brother by secretly completing one of his unfinished plays and sending it off to a famous critic called Alone (Maura), a media superstar (Maura plays her as a cross between Oprah Winfrey and Barry Humphries).

A series of expressionistic touches - ballet inserts, clips from Powell and Pressburger’s The Tales of Hoffmann – build towards a cathartic third-act sequence (set among the glaciers of Patagonia) which does, finally, possess a sort of weird power. But it’s a long stretch to get there.

Production companies
American Zoetrope
Zoetropa Argentina
Tornasol
BIM Distribuzione

International sales
American Zoetrope
(1) 415 788 7500

Producer
Francis Ford Coppola

Cinematography
Mihai Malaimare Jr

Production design
Sebastian Orgambide

Editing and re-recording
Walter Murch

Music
Osvaldo Golijov

Main cast
Vincent Gallo
Maribel Verdu
Alden Ehrenreich
Klaus Maria Brandauer
Carmen Maura
Rodrigo de la Serna

"Tetro", de Francis Ford Coppola (Variety)

(U.S.-Argentina-Spain-Italy) An American Zoetrope production. Produced by Francis Ford Coppola. Executive producers, Anahid Nazarian, Fred Roos. Directed, written by Francis Ford Coppola.

Tetro - Vincent Gallo
Bennie - Alden Ehrenreich
Miranda - Maribel Verdu
Carlo/Alfie - Klaus Maria Brandauer
Alone - Carmen Maura
Jose - Rodrigo De La Serna
Josefina - Leticia Bredice
Abelardo - Mike Amigorena
Maria Luisa - Sofia Castiglione
Ana - Erica Rivas

By TODD MCCARTHY

Although markedly better than his previous small-scaled, self-financed film, "Youth Without Youth," Francis Ford Coppola's "Tetro" is still a work of modest ambition and appeal. Gloriously shot in mostly black-and-white widescreen in Buenos Aires, Coppola's first original screenplay since 1974's "The Conversation" hinges on the tension between two long-separated brothers dominated by an artistic genius father. The angst-ridden treatment of Oedipal issues makes the picture play out like a passably talented imitation of O'Neill, Williams, Miller and Inge, and thus it feels like the pale product of an over-tilled field. Coppola will release the film himself Stateside, doubtless to marginal returns, and in the long run, "Tetro" likely will be most remembered for introducing a highly promising young actor, Alden Ehrenreich.

Allegedly first noticed by Steven Spielberg in a homevideo played at a bat mitzvah and subsequently discovered by longtime casting ace and producer Fred Roos, the 18-year-old Ehrenreich manages the remarkable feat of resembling by turns three of the leading actors from "The Departed": When he first appears, he looks like the younger brother of Leonardo DiCaprio; then, at certain moments, his smile and the look in his eye recall Jack Nicholson, while his head and facial shape are reminiscent of Matt Damon. Not only that, he has a winning screen presence and proves entirely up to the role's dramatic requirements.

Ehrenreich plays Bennie, who, clad in the spiffy whites of a cruise ship attendant, uses a Buenos Aires layover to track down his brother Tetro (Vincent Gallo). Arriving unannounced at the apartment his brother shares with g.f. Miranda (Maribel Verdu) in the artsy La Boca district, Bennie wants to know why Tetro never followed up on his promise to come back for him when the older boy left home a decade earlier.

Bennie has always idealized Tetro as a successful bohemian artist, but the scruffy malcontent destroys that image quickly, rebuffing Bennie's familial overtures and refusing to answer his many questions. Tetro seems so overwhelmed by resentment, regret and anger, mostly concerning his illustrious orchestra-conductor father Carlo (Klaus Maria Brandauer), that the most he can do is scribble notes on scraps of paper he shows to no one.

Miranda mediates a kind of truce that at least keeps Tetro from kicking Bennie out and, at length, revelations leak out in conversation and color flashbacks about deep, disturbing family secrets centering on Carlo, his unbridled egomania and sense of droit du seigneur.

Fraught with Greek and Freudian weight, these crucial disclosures constitute the thematic meat of the piece and explicitly explain the reasons for Tetro's dreadful psychological condition and his desire to escape the family. But while what went on years ago might more than justify the unsteady course of Tetro's subsequent life, Coppola's gradual lifting of the dramatic lid over the course of more than two hours frankly feels old-fashioned and labored; the sort of transgressions summoned up have, of late, become the stuff of comedy and instantly disposable daytime TV talk -- no longer the exclusive property of deep-dish dramatists bent on exploring how the warped behavior of above-the-law patriarchs leads to tragedy.

What would, then, have been weighty material for the stage, bigscreen or television back in the '50s now has the feel of a small, particular story that's been inflated to immodest proportions. At the same time, Coppola lacks the writerly flair to make the big scenes soar or resonate with multiple meanings and dimensions; rather, they more often than not seem abruptly curtailed and somewhat unsatisfying.

In his search for the story's full impact, the writer-director is not overly assisted by Gallo, who has no trouble catching the bohemian physical aspects and sullen antisocial attitude of a self-styled artist, but doesn't reach down deep to where he might uncover nuggets of true character revelation; he never finds Tetro's bottom. By contrast, Ehrenreich's Bennie, hitherto unexposed to the family skeletons, is a veritable beacon of optimism and endeavor, and the teenage thesp makes the picture his own.

Other thesps, including the lively Verdu ("Y tu mama tambien") and the imposing Brandauer, register as required, albeit with no surprises. Spanish diva Carmen Maura swans through as an influential art-world maven amusingly named "Alone," who bestows and withdraws her favor at a whim.

The film's physical specifications are impeccable. Retaining much of the same crew from "Youth Without Youth," including lenser Mihai Malaimare Jr., composer Osvaldo Golijov and indispensable longtime editor and sound wizard Walter Murch, Coppola gets good value from his Argentine locations and provides abundant sensory pleasure. Use of black-and-white here creates a link with the director's 1983 "Rumble Fish," his only previous monochrome outing, which also dealt with two brothers with a significant age difference.

Coppola has spent much of his career, as well as a great deal of his own money, seeking the ideal state of truly independent filmmaking. The trouble, as always, is in being careful what you wish for, since when he finds creative nirvana, he frequently has trouble delivering the full goods. "Tetro" represents something of a middle ground in that respect.

Camera (B&W/color, widescreen), Mihai Malaimare Jr.; editor, Walter Murch; music, Osvaldo Golijov; production designer, Sebastian Orgambide; set decorator, Paulina Lopez Meyer; costume designer, Cecilia Monti; sound (Dolby), Vicente D'Elia; re-recording mixer, Murch; associate producer, Masa Tsuyuki; assistant director, Juan Pablo Laplace; second unit director, Roman Coppola; casting, Walter Rippel. Reviewed at Wilshire screening room, Beverly Hills, April 29, 2009. (In Cannes Film Festival -- Directors Fortnight, opener; Seattle Film Festival.) Running time: 127 MIN. (English, Spanish dialogue)

"Tetro", de Francis Ford Coppola: los tres primeros minutos

Francis Ford Coppola sigue con todo el lanzamiento de "Tetro". Ahora subieron a Apple Trailers (ver aquí), los tres primeros minutos de la película (en versión standard y HD). Véanlos y después me cuentan...

Trailer de "Tetro", de Francis Ford Coppola

Más de Coppola y "Tetro"