Tetro

WORD ON the street suggests that Tetro constitutes a partial return to form for the director of The Godfatherand Apocalypse Now. Well, if you imagine heavy italics on the word "partial" then the argument just about holds up.

Unlike Youth Without Youth, Francis Ford Coppola's last film, the new picture doesn't actually lead you to question the film-maker's sanity. Unlike Jack, Francis's nadir, it doesn't inspire you to scratch savagely at your eyes. Sure, the film is empty, muddled and full of itself. But it is rather beautiful and does have one and a half diverting performances.

Vincent Gallo (the half) stars as the titular hero, a blocked writer who, estranged from his musician father, long ago left New York for a bohemian corner of Buenos Aires.

The film begins with Bennie (Alden Ehrenreich), his younger brother, arriving in town and making his way to his sibling’s house. Tetro’s girlfriend (Maribel Verdú) welcomes him but when the man of the house arrives, the atmosphere chills. Tetro wants nothing to do with his family or his old life. The film follows the relationship between the two men as they quarrel their way towards artistic success and a messy personal understanding.

Coming across like a blend of young Orson Welles and younger Leonardo DiCaprio, the largely unknown Ehrenreich is a minor revelation as the confused naïf. Gallo is less successful in the larger role. The closest thing to a model for the character in Coppola's earlier work appears in Rumblefish: Mickey Rourke as The Motorcycle Boy. But, whereas that character was a charismatic enigma, Tetro comes across as a shallow, talentless fraud.

It is possible to make an interesting film about a bohemian monster; it is less easy to fashion one around a bohemian bore.

It doesn't help that, in trying to bolster a hopelessly thin script, the actors improvise too many scenes into formless slop. And yet; there is something here. With gorgeous monochrome cinematography by Mihai Malaimare, Tetrodoes come across as a very ambitious, very singular class of failure. That might, these days, be the most we can hope for from Francis.