It may not be the greatest film that he has ever made but, at every turn, Tetro proves an excellent primer in the life and work of Francis Ford Coppola. The semi-autobiographical plot reminds us of the filmmaker's place in a Hollywood dynasty that includes his composer father, Carmine; the action, although fictional, is drawn from Coppola's own childhood; indeed, this is the Old Master's first screenplay since The Conversation. Domestic in setting yet operatic in volume, shot in unassuming digital yet self-aggrandising in tone, Tetro is rife with the contradictions that have defined the director's career.
The grand old Oedipal melodrama kicks off with 18 year-old Bennie (Alden Ehrenreich) looking up his older brother Tetro - the title character and the Italian for 'glum' - in Buenos Aires. In Bennie's mind, his sibling is a great artist; in reality, big bro is angry, damaged and essayed by the ever-bombastic Vincent Gallo. As Tetro scowls at his brother and scrawls notes for plays that will never be performed, flashbacks reveal causes underlying the familial and personal discontent. Papa Carlo (Klaus Maria Brandauer), it transpires, was a manipulative old rotter who bullied his younger brother, Alfie (Brandauer again), as well as his sons, with the commandment that "there is only room for one genius in this family."
As Coppola movies featuring patriarchs go, Tetro is hardly his finest genealogical work. But as the director's second venture into self-financed, digital filmmaking, there is something charming that was not apparent in the recent time-travelling sprawl, Youth Without Youth. Shot in sumptuous black and white and peppered with references to Powell and Pressburger and The Night of the Hunter, Tetro is, unabashedly, the work of a true cinephile. Hooray. We can use the words 'return to form' and actually mean them.