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It's big, it's controversial, it's pretty much incomprehensible. What's not to admire! Francis Ford Coppola's Cannes sensation Megalopolis.
The expectations for Megalopolis, the passion project of movie legend Francis Ford Coppola, were astronomical - 40 years in the planning, the biggest stars in the world coming and going over that time.
The title alone implied the size of Megalopolis' aspirations.
After the build-up, the reaction to the film has been mostly hostile. That's the problem with calling it a "fable", rather than an entertainment we can draw our own lessons from.
A fable means the characters aren't really people. They're symbols, paralleling modern America with ancient Rome.
Any lessons will be handed out by Coppola himself, thank you very much.
Our hero is Cesar Catalina - Adam Driver gets all the pretentious movies these days. He's an architect so awesomely inspiring that he can literally stop time whenever he feels like it.
In this, Cesar differs from his two main rivals. First there's the wealthy but soulless Hamilton Crassus the Third, played by Jon Voight.
Another enemy of Cesar's is devious politician Mayor Cicero - Giancarlo Esposito. I'm not sure why he hates the artistic Cesar so much - some people just don't like architects, I suppose.
Complicating matters is the fact Cicero's daughter Julia falls for Cesar.
No, if they marry, she won't become Julia Cesar. That would be silly. Cesar's surname is Catalina, remember?
However, it's hard to keep up with such soap operatics with so much spectacle up on the screen. Imagine Las Vegas without the taste and restraint. That's it…
But under all the gold and glitter, what's actually happening? Apart from anything, what are A-listers Jason Schwartzman and Dustin Hoffman doing, playing the merest "hey yous" to the mayor?
However, these are trivial questions that clearly Coppola hoped we wouldn't trouble our little heads over.
We should be more concerned about the future of our society, where politics holds progressive ideas hostage. As he says - and he says this over and over - the political "now" has become more important than the artistic "forever".
If Coppola feels that money is a corrupting force in modern American society, he's about to be relieved of a considerable amount of his. As he's done before, he's broken the cardinal rule in movies, using his own money to pay for Megalopolis, and gambling that the result of 40 years of musing over the future would attract big audiences.
The fact is, toying with a half-formulated idea for decades doesn't necessarily clarify matters.
Megalopolis seems to have started, not so much with a simple, smart idea but with a vague, well-trodden one: republican Rome/America being taken over by a few rich gangsters. A story he already told far better in The Godfather, of course.
Ironically, it's better if you disengage your brain and simply wallow in the film's excesses - the clash between art, business and politics, the corruption of a virginal pop star, the riots of the masses and the endless bread and circuses. And in the middle of it all, a parade of bewildered stars doing what they're told.
Megalopolis has split people, not quite down the middle. The large majority profess themselves nonplussed by the gilded dreamscapes and finger-wagging philosophy.
And a noisy minority - mostly long-term Coppola fans - praise the film's scale and damn-the-torpedos ambition. One thing - it's like nothing else this year, or the last 10 years for that matter.
