The writing and directing debut of Roman Coppola amounts to the second apple, after Sofia Coppola's Virgin Suicides, to fall from the tree of Francis Coppola and to roll down the hill into the ditch. Set in 1969, when the writer-director would have been three years old, it throws up a rickety bridge between the navel-gazing underground film à la David Holzman's Diary and the trendy sci-fi spy spoof à la Barbarella. The truth-seeking undergrounder, played by that uncharismatic sloucher and murmurer, Jeremy Davies, happens improbably to be the film editor of the big-budget spy spoof on location in Paris, and even more improbably to be promoted to the helm when the "revolutionary" Godardian director (Gerard Depardieu), in his need to "subvert the expectations of the audience," runs afoul of the De Laurentiisian producer (Giancarlo Giannini). The undergrounder, it ought to have gone without saying, is no more equipped to handle such a project than Roman Coppola is: the evidence, under the film-within-the-film title of Codename [one word] Dragonfly, is right in front of our eyes, and in abundance. Young Coppola at least demonstrates that he has boned up on the cinematic esoterica of his infancy: cameo roles, as an example, for L.M. Kit Carson and John Phillip Law, stars of the aforementioned David Holzman's Diary and Barbarella, respectively. But who could be imagined to want to watch this movie? Anyone who knows enough to have a nostalgic interest in it will also know enough to discredit it. Angela Lindvall, Elodie Bouchez, Jason Schwartzman, Billy Zane. (2002) — Duncan Shepherd
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