But Seriously, Folks

Roman Coppola (Photo By John Anderson)

While not exactly hilarious, the fact that Roman Coppola is fond of prefacing anecdotes with the phrase "You know, it's funny ..." is rather funny -- or at least amusing -- if only for the simple reason that, ever since CQ's Cannes premiere, its 36-year-old director has been trying to convince audiences and the press that CQ does not take itself too seriously. That it is neither pretentious nor indulgent, but funny. "It's meant to be funny," he told the sold-out Alamo Drafthouse crowd before last Saturday's American debut. "So if you think something might be slightly funny, go ahead and laugh."

They did. But the next morning, Coppola expressed a need to qualify CQ's content. "There's no poster, there's no trailer, there's not much talk. I mean, no one really knows how to take this movie. I sort of felt like in the past when I showed it, you know, the title's very mysterious, the premise is kind of weird, and also, having such a prominent last name or whatever, you have some kind of expectation," he said. "So I guess I've been wanting to help people along to note that it's intended to be playful. It's not an out-and-out comedy, but it's supposed to be fun."

Coppola, known mostly for his video and commercial work (or, alternately, for his father, Francis Ford), also called his auteurish first feature a "love letter to filmmaking, specifically filmmaking of the Sixties." A statement like that can get you into trouble. But here, it's true. CQ stars a poised, nearly perfect Jeremy Davies as an expat documentarian living in Paris in 1969. He's working as an editor on a futuristic sci-fi secret agent flick called Dragonfly, a doomed project whose director (Gérard Depardieu) is fired when he can't come up with an ending. Eventually, Davies' Paul is hired to finish the film, while at the same time working on his own: a documentary about his life, right now, recorded primarily in the apartment he shares with his girlfriend (Élodie Bouchez). That's the easy part. On the whole, CQ is a reality-blurred meta-movie, a grand pastiche of New Wave and B-cinema, a two-hour mural with several other paintings hidden underneath. It's a study of duplicity set to a running-in-the-rain soundtrack by French popsters Mellow. Fun for the addict to decode its many references (Truffaut's Day for Night, Elio Petri's The 10th Victim, Fellini's Il Bidone, Dad's The Conversation, among countless others), fun for the casual fan to sit back and watch.

"You know, it's funny. A friend of mine, Kit Carson, who's in the movie, and who has been very influential 'cause he was David Holzman in David Holzman's Diary, which is a movie heavily referenced, said, 'Oh, it's a movie about twos,'" Coppola recalled. "And I was like, 'Yeah, you're right!' There's two of everything: the young and the old, 1969 and 1970, art and commerce. It's a movie kind of constructed of these opposing things. Playfulness and a sort of seriousness. Color, black-and-white; flashiness and austerity, all of that stuff. And it's all kind of fractured. It's not super clear-cut."