Tetro

Tetro

Opening August 14th
Exclusively
at the Cinéma du Parc

Consider Francis Ford Coppola’s new movie Tetro as grand opera – - monster deities, codes of honor, aristocratic hankypank, opulent visuals, hysterical excess, flamboyant melodrama. Of course you know what he's getting at: pageantry, pomp, spectacle: Coppola’s epic films have all examined fratricide and betrayal in its operatic theatricality. His Godfather Trilogy – - organized crime as family-centred saga – - was a place of ruthless, dehumanizing behaviour, of betrayal, of resentments and terrible deceptions - ending on the steps of the Teatro Massimo Opera House in Palermo, after a performance of Cavaleria Rusticana. Rustic chivalry, doncha get it!

His Apocalypse Now - warfare as Imperial delirium - captured the megalomaniacal grandiosity that is America – its blind passions, epic rivalries, insatiable appetites and shattering tragedies. I love the smell of napalm in the morning! glows Robert Duvall, as his helicopter gunships level a Vietnam village, accompanied by Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries. So Coppola understands grand opera's descent into darkness that dehumanizes his patriarchs and inspires his greatest monsters: de Niro’s Vito Corleone in Godfather I; Al Pacino’s Michael in all three Godfathers; both Brando’s Don Corleone and his Kurtz in Apocalypse Now. And now we have Tetro: another Coppola patriarch monster resides at the centre of this movie as well, albeit off-camera for the most part. When Tetro was first released Coppola quipped:

The difference between The Godfather and this film is four stabbings, two strangulations, 20 murders by gun, three murders by car explosion and one machine gun murder!

While you really don’t need to have seen Victor Hugo’s satirical play, Le Roi s’amuse (1832), where a monster king seduces a guileless maiden; nor Guiseppe Verdi’s Rigoletto (1851), where the priapic Duke of Mantua seduces Gilda, daughter of the court jester; nor Delibes’ ballet, Coppelia, (1870) where Doctor Coppélius’ life-like dancing doll persuades a village swain to abandon his true heart's desire; nor Jacques Offenbach’s version of the same tale in Tales of Hoffman (1881) – where the malevolent evil scientist Coppélius makes an automaton appear real, Coppola alludes to all of the above: rituals of patriarchal droit de seigneur and diabolical betrayal. Oedipal settlements of scores. Monster king hankypank, doncha know. Tetro focuses less on perfidious Hot-Hunk-Stud Kings than their abuse, the collateral mutilation they inflict on their own family. We glimpse the monster-king/seduced maiden action only briefly in technicolor flashback (Look at me, I have this because I’m entitled transpired 20 years before Tetro begins).

Come to think of it: don’t fuss yourself researching Hugo, Verdi, Delibes and Offenbach research. This is the story of our times. The swaggering patriarch lusting after his must-have trophy-babe is our enduring myth: Bill Clinton, Woody Allen, Silvio Berlusconi, Donald Trump, Nicholas Sarkozy all of whose sexual entitlements go unchallenged: Je suis le roi. The more powerful I am, the more self-assured I become, the easier for me to think: I’m gittin’ myself a princess. Whatever love exists between them, trophy wife is testament to his Deity. God Save our King! Indeed Ségolène Royal once observed on philandering French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, On se croirait revenu sous l'Ancien régime où le roi s'amuse. Ouch! Henry VIII may have concocted this prerogative.

At seventy years of age, Francis Ford Coppola’s panache for risk-taking movie-making still knows few bounds. In the press notes (which I’ve included as a pdf below), Coppola wrote:

Even though the story of TETRO has little to do with the story of my own life, the characters all embody parts of me. I wrote a completely fictitious story that nonetheless drew on memories from my family. It was heavily influenced by those films and plays that I had admired as a theater student and aspiring playwright. As in the theatrical tradition of Tennessee Williams’s Sweet Bird of Youth or Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, or even in Eugene O’Neill’s Desire Under the Elms, the father figure in Tetro is, in a sense, a “Biblical” father, cruel and domineering, someone who must be ultimately destroyed if his sons are to survive. Since the beginning of time and even within the animal kingdom, we all have been in competition with the most powerful men of the family. My own father wasn't like that, he was kind and inspiring, but because he was brilliant and somewhat vain, it was just a few more steps to turn into a monster.

While one could look to my own family to shed light on the film’s themes, these themes will most likely be of interest to any family, since such rivalries exist in all families. I’ve always believed that if you’re going to go through all the work it takes to make a film, it should be a film that is somewhat revealing about your thoughts and emotions, which are truly who you are.

So let’s take Coppola‘s word when denies/affirms Tetro's autobiographicality. He is, after all, a moviedom patriarch himself. The Coppolas rival the Barrymores as Hollywood aristocracy: filmmaker Sophia his daughter (who will direct Manon Lescaut next year in France); actor Nicholas Cage his nephew; Jason Schwartzman, his sister Talia’s son. At Wikipedia are 18 separate Coppola family profiles compared to 17 for the Barrymores. Check the connectors at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coppola_family. He alludes, in his notes, to both Tennessee Williams and Eugene O’Neill whose life meets art meets family meets movie approach he admires. Tennessee Williams and Eugene O'Neill? Hmmmm. Tetro’s thinly veiled savagery is so raw and painful, it’s hard to believe Coppola, the writer, is not making certain parallels. In Tetro, the libertine is an orchestra conductor, the mother a diva. Coppola’s own father, Carmine was an arranger-composer, his mother composed Italian songs. (His Uncle Anton was the conductor.) Indeed, friction between Carmine Coppola and Anton, Coppola has admitted, helped inspire Tetro.

In re-exploring family monsters, Coppola bares scars of his own troubled production embarrassments as well, full of pain, disappointment, failure and betrayal. Think of the mortifying clunkers he’s turned out over the last 30 years - One From the Heart (’82), Rumble Fish and The Outsiders (1983), Peggy Sue Got Married (1986), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992).

Even though Tetro runs 127 minutes, Puccini-like motifs thread through Tetro; operatic and ballet allusions, Nino Rota music, lurid Technicolor clips from the British ballet soap, The Red Shoes (where the diabolical monster is a ballet impressario), quotes from the movies of Orson Welles, Carol Reed, Roman Polanski, early Fellini, Rob’t Mitchum’s knuckles from Night of the Hunter; Kazan’s On the Waterfront. I certainly could not absorb them all. But no matter. If Tetro does not become a classic right away, it will sometime in the future. Filmed in lustrous black-and-white digital video (Coppola paid for the movie himself), Tetro is a rapture to watch, haunting, languid, unforgettable.