CQ (2002)

Image credit: CQ: Jean-Paul Kieffer

MISS UNIVERSE Superbabe Lindvall sees the dark side of the moon in ''CQ''

Francis Ford Coppola seems to have raised an entire family of chips off the old auteur. Two years after Sofia Coppola made her feature directorial debut with ''The Virgin Suicides,'' 37-year-old Roman Coppola makes his with CQ, a whimsical plop of meringue set in 1969 Paris. Jeremy Davies, who looks no closer to breaking out of his boyish reticence than he did eight years ago in ''Spanking the Monkey,'' is the slack-jawed hero, who sits around his apartment shooting a black-and-white, new-wave-style art film -- that is, when he's not hard at work editing a sci-fi sexploitation B movie and mooning over its heroine (Angela Lindvall), a Barbarella-ish superspy in a beige leather jumpsuit. Coppola, who has made clever music videos, including the one for Moby's ''Honey,'' clearly had a lot of fun detailing the mod cheesiness of this intergalactic period piece, though the satire would have been more ticklish if ''Austin Powers'' hadn't gotten there first. When Davies' character is given the high-stress chance to step in and direct the end of the movie, CQ suddenly appears to be about nothing so much as Roman Coppola puckishly rechanneling his father's anxiety over how to finish ''Apocalypse Now.''