LAST DANCE WITH LIFE: THE GODFATHER - PART III

Separated by 15 years from its predecessors, The Godfather - Part III (1990) arrived in theaters three decades ago. Its director, Francis Ford Coppola, states that his original intention was not to continue the story beyond the two parts made in 1972 and 1974, and that this new work emerged as an epilogue. While it isn’t narratively essential for the story, such finale manages to respect the integrity of the unit already established by its preceding films while also justifying its own existence.

The movie portrays the fall of Michael, former leader of the Corleone criminal family, in his late years. Ill and tired of remaining involved in illegitimate businesses, he seeks to bond with his two children and ex-wife, from whom he is estranged. The ending (spoiler alert) delivers the definitive hit, as Michael loses his daughter (played by Sofia Coppola, daughter of the director, in a role with which, in a certain way, he hands her to world) in an attempt on his life as he exits the opera where his son debuts. What follows, a cinematic representation of Michael’s end, provides an understanding of death that transcends a definition from the factual and the figurative: being likewise alive and lifeless.

Paramount Pictures.

Michael’s resolution contrasts in its treatment with that of his daughter Mary. Hers, quick and sharp like the bullet that kills her, is followed closely by the film’s perspective, its movement being motivated by Mary falling to her knees. Michael’s, on the contrary, is born out of visual fragments of Mary’s relatives’ reactions to the tragedy before their eyes, structured by a general view of them at the stairs. Among these, a close and frontal frame of Michael becomes recurrent, as he ends up letting out a profound and prolonged scream, his relatives’ reactions being directed momentarily towards him.

Paramount Pictures.

The cinematic point of view leaves this scene in the long shot of the Corleone family, fallen by the stairs, and dissolves to an earlier moment in the film, where Mary and Michael dance during a celebration of the papal honors he receives from the Church. This image sets us in state of reunion between these two characters that have just been separated, without any new experiences ahead but only those already lived. This resonates as the wish of an agonizing Michael, with the notion of only being able to be together in memories or in a state of death.

Paramount Pictures.

Suddenly, a cut in the action takes us back to the first movie: now, Michael dances with his first wife, Apolonia, on the day of their wedding. This evocation has a double reading, as it brings a time in which Michael was happy, but also, one that ended with his wife’s death in an explosion planned for him. The match, reinforced by the continuity in the movement of the dance as one time period is switched for the other, makes a comparison between the two innocent victims inevitable. It is as if, more than a repetition, it was only one event and story.

Paramount Pictures.

A third time jump - matching in movement once more - returns us to the second movie, where Michael dances with Kay, his second wife and mother of his children, during their son Anthony’s first communion celebration. This step in the assembled sequence solidifies the pattern proposed by the previous two of women Michael loses in his life, with a difference: it isn’t death that separates them here, but Kay herself, leaving him when he stays in a life of crime. Furthermore, in spite of the bonding they go through in the final film, their daughter’s death seems to extinguish in them any hope of repairing their relationship.

Paramount Pictures.

Each of the frames depicted circles around the idea that it is there that Michael’s life ends, but the conclusion adds an antithesis to its formula. The film dissolves again, a transition distinct from the hard cuts of the previous moments and as such of a different order, as if the experience of the past came to an end and the action returned to the present. However, it isn’t the opera we come come back to, but Michael, much older and in solitude, by a garden. Sitting on a bench and crestfallen, the once Don lifts his gaze and, after putting his glasses on, collapses on the ground, inert.

The structure of this ending resembles its predecessor’s, but it isn’t redundant on the story caped off by the first two parts. In Part II, a succession of scenes joined by dissolves shows Michael at his house in the present, a dinner with his siblings during his youth away from family businesses, his childhood in his father’s arms, and his not-too-distant future at the park of his home, with wrinkles on his face and alone on a bench. The solitude he is in, common across the two finales, has a different context.

The Godfather - Part III sets us up for a climax that is reached in Michael’s cathartic howl, the archive footage that follows representing the absence of new experiences. Every instance symbolizes his death, either partial or whole, to the point that the teleological image of lonely Michael seems a mere occurrence or afterthought. Does he, then, die there, at the opera, following his daughter? What is to die? Coppola’s new edit of the film, prepared for December 2020, will inescapably have to go through these questions.

Titled “Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone” instead of “Part III”, the accent will be put on the idea that there are worse ills than dying, as Michael lives to experience the loss of those he loves. If Coppola’s and Mario Puzo’s final intentions are to pose this idea and, once more, the the conclusion of the saga, any sense will have to be found insuperably in considering and articulating experiences separated far from each other. This, whether understood as a dilated and sustained form of killing oneself, or as a punch that takes life more than death itself can.

Originally written in Spanish on 09/10/2020 and published on 16/12/2020 at https://bienestaloquebienacaba.wordpress.com/2020/12/16/ultima-danza-con-la-vida-el-padrino-parte-iii/