By Joshua Tyler
| Published
When Francis Ford Coppola’s son, Roman, announced he was becoming a film director, cinephiles got excited. His entry into filmmaking was met with dreams that he might continue the legacy of his Godfather directing father. Instead, he made a movie about making a movie.
CQ is a 2001 movie about making movies that were never actually made. Don’t worry, it’s not that confusing. Boring, yes, but certainly not confusing. Future Lost star Jeremy Davies plays Paul, a struggling young director who funds his personal film by working as a film editor on a cheesy, big-budget science-fiction movie. But his director doesn’t have an ending, and eventually Paul finds himself gifted with the job.
Coppola’s directorial debut is a layered and stylistic film that, despite a fairly slow-paced, almost humdrum approach to character development, makes a decent attempt at meaningful cinema. Perhaps the real problem is simply that the main character, Paul, is a dud.
Paul is emotionally cut off and lacking in charm. He’s not a bad guy, but it’s hard to understand him when young Paul seems to go out of his way to avoid interacting with his environment. He hides behind his camera, behind his movie, eventually driving away the woman he cares about. In the process, young Roman Coppola drives his audience right to sleep, despite his quick-cut approach to plot development.
CQ‘s structure is an interesting gimmick. Coppola has crammed three movies into one, and uses them to tell the story of the one person involved in all three.
The first movie is Paul’s personal film, where he videotapes his life to capture “real honesty.” The second is the sci-fi film that Paul constructs, learning about his actors and himself in the process. The third is the film we are watching, the one that encases the other two.
Prior to making CQ, Roman Coppola’s career had largely been in filming music videos. Afterward, he went back to those kinds of gigs. He did try making a couple of smaller feature films and documentaries, but none got the attention of his first film. CQ began and ended Roman Coppola’s career as a significant filmmaker. That’s a shame because though it is flawed there was promise in CQ, a promise that could have been nurtured into something special.
