Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 45: Wed Feb 14

One from the Heart: Reprise (Coppola, 1982): Prince Charles Cinema, 1pm


This unfairly maligned movie is back in a great 4K restoration and in a modified version via its director Francis Ford Coppola. The film also screens on February 16th and 27th. Full details here. Here's New Yorker critic Richard Brody's take.

Time Out review:
Apparently Francis Ford Coppola got his inspiration while wandering the back streets of Tokyo with a copy of Goethe's Elective Affinities, pondering the Kabuki and his alimony payments. He saw a sequence of brilliant tableaux: a hoary yarn about love lost and refound, spun with high-tech artifice and elaborate theories about colour. Fortunately the movie outgrew its origins with barely a stretch mark in sight, to become a likeable, idiosyncratic musical, its few remaining pretensions (dud symbolism just when you most expect it) so bare-faced they're almost winning. The human element keeps the film modest. Coppola shows an affection for the commonplaceness of his new romantic couple (Frederick Forrest and Terri Garr) surprising after his previous ones from the heart of darkness: they smooch, quarrel, cheat on each other (respectively with Natassja Kinski and Raul Julia), and live to smooch again over a long Fourth of July weekend in a Las Vegas confected entirely in the sets and mixing-boards of Zoetrope studios. The result, crafted with the help of cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, looks terrific: walls dissolve, scenes play in wry tandem, and the dance routines move nimbly into neon-tinged fantasies. At times the project seems in danger of being scuppered by its own lavishness; the saving grace is a light heart.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

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