Tetro Francis Ford Coppola

Francis Coppola presents in the Director’s Fortnight Tetro, an epic on familiar conflicts made in widescreen, deep black-and-white, and set in Buenos Aires. Coppola fans might recognize some familiar issues from The Godfather, but the similarities don’t go much further than that. Instead of murders and revenges, Tetro’s violence is mostly psychological and interiorized. It looks as if the great Shakespearean dramas and psychoanalytic theories have guided Coppola in the making of this story that combines love and rivalry between two brothers, suffocated by the figure of an oppressive father. The bonds between them are, above all, those of an artistic talent that runs in the family.

Vincent Gallo plays an author who represents all the values of the romantic artist: the inherent need to create art, a feeling of not belonging to society, a troubled personality and the inability to separate his personal life from his creations. In a way, Tetro (the character) is a work of art himself. Coppola finds in his protagonist an alter-ego and manages to build, by adding up most of the aesthetic and thematic aspects of his interests, a curious and baroque self-portrait.

Bruno Carmelo