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What’s With the Fourth-Wall Break in Megalopolis?
Here’s what to expect from the strange live-performance element in Francis Ford Coppola’s new movie.
The film’s characters, all members of a fableized city-state elite in the moments leading up to the fall of the American empire, wax philosophical about it constantly: about who will hold power, what civilization will looklike, matters of inheritance, succession, growth, and decay. Throughout the film’s 138 minutes, he plays with triptych split screens and surreal, trippy CGI, and in a postmodernist time warp, blends these overtly digital techniques with more blatant, old-timey effects like iris shots, used to denote focus or end scenes. The one effect that seems to have captured film nerds’ imaginations more than any other is a “live” fourth-wall break, in which Adam Driver’s character, Cesar Catilina, responds to a question posed by an actual performer in the movie theater where Megalopolis is screening.
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