"CQ"

This debut film by Roman Coppola (son of Francis) is a frothy, sexy, '60s delight with a movie lover's heart.

By Stephanie Zacharek

May 29, 2002 | The movies we love best don't necessarily stick with us as distinct wholes but as flashes of images that can strike, cobralike, in our memories at any time. We carry them around with us daily, year after year, adding to them gradually, accumulating private archives of memorized visions that give us the most sharply felt pleasure.

As professionals, filmmakers reference significant movies all the time, but dedicated civilian moviegoers (and critics) may rifle through the libraries we carry in our brains just as often as they do, if not more. And every once in a while, a filmmaker will make a movie with a professional's skill but a movie lover's eye, offering a vision that's like a valentine made by the most talented kid in art class. Watching these movies is like poring over shared scrapbooks and discovering that someone has clipped and saved the same pictures, finding beauty in the same odd mix of things that you have.

With his first feature, "CQ," Roman Coppola opens his scrapbook wide. There's an aura of knowing ridiculousness about the movie: It's a fable about an American film editor living in France in 1969 who has been assigned to work on an Italian-made sci-fi fantasy called "Dragonfly" but who is more obsessed with making his own, more personal (and therefore, he believes, more significant) film.

And yet "CQ"'s awareness of its own absurdity is one of the things that make it so joyous and ultimately even moving. Directing with a beautifully light touch, Coppola simultaneously sends up self-absorbed young filmmakers and acknowledges that, to give anything of value to the world, they also have to give up something of themselves. Their narcissism becomes a slippery, reflective surface; real life doesn't stick to it, but it's a powerful emulsion for translating memories of life half-lived into resonant words and pictures.

The boy at the center of "CQ," Paul (Jeremy Davies), is the stand-in for every young, tortured filmmaker we've ever come to know and love-hate. He dislikes his job: "Dragonfly" is too pop for his sensibility and his dreams, and yet we also see how its plasticky colorfulness seduces him against his will. And then, of course, there's its star, Valentine (Angela Lindvall), who plays the high-class, high-cost futuristic double agent, Dragonfly. She slinks through the movie within a movie in a pearlized pink leather flight suit -- or, alternatively, rolls blissfully on the bed in the altogether in a flurry of bills, the money being blown in through a slot in her bedroom as payment from the big government agency she's working for.

Paul is transfixed by Valentine, and ultimately, when he has the chance to take over the direction of "Dragonfly," throws himself wholeheartedly into making it as good as it can be, though not so much for her sake as for his own. Its glossy surface is a far cry from his personal pet project, a black-and-white 16mm film that shows him addressing the camera as he sits on his toilet, sharing what he thinks are his deepest thoughts and artistic obsessions -- that's his idea of complete honesty in filmmaking.

Between "Dragonfly" and his personal moviemaking ambitions, Paul's pouty and oh-so-French girlfriend, Marlene (Élodie Bouchez), feels lost in the shuffle. When Paul explains to her that he's seeking to "capture what's real," she steps in front of his lens and shoots back, "What if it's boring? Did you ever think about that?"

Paul, who's played by Davies with just the right amount of sympathetic blankness, hasn't thought about it, but Coppola has. "CQ" is a meditation both on the joys and the limitations of art -- and on the way that sometimes when we seek to make art, we succeed only in fostering boredom, but when we look the other way it magically appears. Paul's movie is much less interesting than the operatically silly "Dragonfly," which has the look and feel of ridiculous extravaganzas like "Modesty Blaise," "The 10th Victim" and, of course, "Barbarella."

Next Page: The Paris riots of May 1968 -- or a weightless pop-culture trip to the moon?

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