Roman Coppola's CQ

It's fun to find correlatives between pop music and movies but CQ surprised me by being a film version of the type of pop music I've recently disliked. The style?self-consciously evoking the 60s, yet slightly off?recalls the hipster muzak of groups like Stereolab and Broadcast. But director-writer Roman Coppola does something richer while essentially doing the same thing. CQ uses the aura of 60s movie culture for esoteric cleverness yet this story of Paul (Jeremy Davies), a young American filmmaker in 1969 Paris, also proclaims the quirky new relationship to pop that Coppola shares with his colleagues Spike Jonze, Wes Anderson, Sofia Coppola, screenwriter Charlie Kaufman?and musicians like Stereolab. Onscreen, this quirkiness is charming. But Coppola's "moovee" is not a film equivalent to muzak because there's much more to it than retro kitsch. In fact, I saw CQ immediately after a screening of Spider-Man and thought: Finally! Something fresh!

Not just a nod to "cool," CQ resurrects an entire cultural spirit?that naive, unexpected sense of possibility that every generation needs in order to innovate. Through his protagonist Paul, Coppola relates to the 60s era's promise of cultural revolution, the eagerness and sincerity that would define film art and pop art forever. Paul trains his 16-mm camera on his French girlfriend, Marlene (Elodie Bouchez), in their cramped apartment, saying, "These are pieces of me. What's real, what's honest." That sentiment doesn't only belong to the 60s; it's like every young artist's self-cannibalization. But when Paul/Coppola announces it, he creates a link to today's ingenuous camcorder geeks?a reminder that there's nothing new under the sun and nothing more beguiling than each new age discovering itself through art and romance.

Coppola avoids the deliberate obscurantism that Stereolab?a pop group that could never click with the popular moment enough to actually have a hit?grinds into preciousness. I'm not saying CQ will challenge Spider-Man at the box office, just that it is never overly conceptualized. Coppola understands the basic appeal of pop (what his father Francis Ford cannot always grasp); he draws cinephilia closer to the global impetus for moviegoing. CQ's humor comes from its intense, unabashed movie love. One of the first images we see is Paul's b&w closeup of a coffee cup?an imitation of the daring, endlessly ponderable icon that Jean-Luc Godard highlighted in Two or Three Things I Know About Her, classically blending the avant-garde with the quotidian. That coffee cup?in which Godard contemplated the universe?was an incomparable moment of modernist cinema; as indispensable for film lovers as the opening guitar riff of "Jumpin' Jack Flash" was to music lovers. And Paul/Coppola, understandably, can't get beyond admiring its audacity.

Yet, despite Paul's obsession with artsiness, his luck veers onto a more accessible course. Working as an editor on an international coproduction, he gets the chance to become a professional director when the blustery Italian producer (Giancarlo Giannini) fires the film's Slavic artiste (Gerard Depardieu). This collision of industry legends (connecting Hollywood tall tales with the plot of Contempt) provides an unexpected opportunity: Paul gets a crash-course in practical, commercial filmmaking. CQ becomes about the facts of film art?expanding notions of modernist creativity to include the personal foibles and sheer, goofy nonsense that was also part of the 60s cinema zeitgeist. It's as if Stereolab went from disaffected psychedelic noodling to the vulgar pleasure of, say, Steppenwolf's "Magic Carpet Ride."

Paul's last-minute exploits on the sci-fi/spy movie simultaneously spoof and explore old and new movie myths. Trying to salvage footage from the James Bondish and Barbarella-like spectacular, Paul falls for his leading lady, Valentine (Angela Lindvall), a Playboy-era valkyrie in mod outfits who exudes the same exotic mystery as Anita Ekberg did in La Dolce Vita. (When he asks this blonde apparition to make a wish, she utters the gnomic, "I wish cats could talk.") CQ doesn't merely recycle pop trash in the adolescent vein of Spider-Man, The Blair Witch Project or the Austin Powers series; the action-movie fragments reflect Paul's attempt to balance his own artistic and sexual infatuation. (Coppola nails 60s awe when the famous Cocteau line "Astonish me!" is followed by an artificial moon landing. It makes hash of all Spider-Man's f/x.) CQ's film-within-a-film maze conjures up Two Weeks in Another Town, but this is more than a tongue-in-cheek insider's joke. Young Coppola investigates Paul's desire to create as part of a credible existential crisis. The film's title may come from computer era software, relating expressive filmmaking to the ICQ communications program, but it is specifically through 60s movies that we are able to identify Paul's age-old dilemma as "modern."

It's modern man's search to understand art (and to be understood in life)?the same anxiety that Brian De Palma raucously satirized in his Vietnam-era films Greetings and especially Hi, Mom!, where young Robert De Niro played a draft-dodging 16-mm peep-art filmmaker. De Palma and De Niro paired horny sincerity with filmmaking ambition, anticipating the era of sex, lies and videotape. Coppola matches De Palma's loose, disarming structure and with dynamite cinematographer Robert Yeoman he nearly matches the nighttime surreality of Fellini's 8 1/2?the ultimate statement of a filmmaker's psychic confusion. (In the streets of Rome Paul hallucinates seeing his twin; the conceit works because Davies is so good at playing a lost young man. Going beyond De Niro, Davies makes Paul both desperate and awestruck.) If CQ doesn't address the hard social truths of Hi, Mom! (an early masterpiece), it's only because Coppola is indeed from a different?pampered?generation. That's why CQ's more introspective.

Minus political motivation, Coppola expresses his morality through art. CQ's filmmaking sequences feature entranced montages of Steenbeck film-editing machines and studio dubbing procedures. It's almost an elegy for a means of creativity?of feeling film?that is on its way out. This nostalgia-plus-ragtag-film-spoofs coheres around a poignant sense of how pop at one time made meaning of the world. Filmmakers from Godard to Roger Vadim to the James Bond personnel all seemed to say, "I seek you." And whether through a coffee cup, an outer space seduction or Cold War intrigue, they spoke to viewers' imaginations. Depardieu's canned director explains to Paul, "Film can change the course of the future, it can make ideas concrete."

This belief in the cinema revolution wasn't only a 60s pop myth. Coppola recreates a shot from Godard's Breathless?a man and woman dressed, in bed?because the composition (better than the Breathless poster Cameron Crowe flashes in Vanilla Sky) returns us to Paul's personal crisis. We're returned to actual feeling, not a style of feeling like Stereolab. (A great boost is the music track by Euro-pop group Mellow?a perfectly nostalgic score that always sounds new.) Young Coppola knows the 60s was considered a golden age of cinema because of the way its movie artists investigated the human condition. It'd be wrong to underrate or deride CQ simply because of its privileged director's lineage. Fact is, this film may be the most extraordinary example of cross-generational communication since Jane Fonda's migrant channeled the ghost of Henry Fonda's Tom Joad in The Dollmaker. Paul connects with his distant father (Dean Stockwell embodying FFC benevolence) at an airport while both are in transit. In spite of their fatigue and bewilderment, the men communicate through half-articulated feeling. Coppola underscores this marvelous scene with the sonic boom of the Concorde, heard as father and son muse on women and infidelity?literally the shock of two generations' recognition. The scene questions if there is ever progress in art, technology or life when guilt and longing and desire are the constants of human behavior. That's right, Wow!

Today's sentimental culture was geared to celebrate (rubber-stamp) the issues in Sofia Coppola's masochistic girls movie The Virgin Suicides, but I don't value this son's two-way confession any less. A lot of care went into CQ's suggestion that the connection between pop art and life should be an abiding concern, not simply the caprice of hipsters. Martin Scorsese once said, "To care about old movies is to care about people." Maybe young Coppola's ode to the 60s would be better understood if it was called The Sum of All Hopes.