Somewhere

Somewhere is Sofia Coppola's latest film. I'm wondering/hoping that she's a somewhat-same-generation filmmaker to grow old with. Saw it last Saturday; it's only playing one place in the whole Bay Area. The limited run is disappointing and understandable. The movie moves in slow, languid paces, through a liquid, gelled atmosphere, languorous.



And true to Coppola's style, the movie was languid (that's her word), all 98 minutes of it. One of the very refreshing things about Coppola is her confidence. Her distinct style works, and it's nice to see, as always, a film that does not use rote filmmaking storytelling. The camera rests on Stephen Dorff's character, Johnny Marco, a movie star living in LA's notorious hotel Chateau Marmont, for long stretches of the movie as he goes through his disaffected and extremely disconnected life. Of course, it's only disaffected and disconnected in a charmed, Ferrari sort of way. Which is an easy criticism of the film's (and possibly Coppola's oeuvre so far) surface subject; all these problems going on in a crystal snowglobe - white castles and sweetness and love: one telescoped presentation of love's, life's full color, shape, being.

Many of the scenes are visual art in and of themselves, calling to mind Julian Schnabel's aesthetic (most notably in his exquisite Diving Bell and the Butterfly). Schnabel is (or was) primarily a painter, and some of his abstract, nonlinear, image-dominated cinematography is (the sensibility at least) seen in Coppola's films.

Somewhere is beautiful, but also a bit too delicate. Elle Fanning, playing Marco's daughter Cleo, was the star of the film, though it's hard to tell if that's because of talent or circumstance. The situation called to mind Scarlett Johanson's in Coppola's 2003 Lost in Translation. The part was perfect for Elle, as a real-life 11-year-old, because she embodied the tragedy of her young-ish father's disoriented life as a just-budding sexual being. She's on a cusp, in a sweet natural way: both woman and girl. Some of the sweetest moments in the film occur when she cracks up in that innocent, sweet, believing laugh of a little girl; you can tell, in several different scenes, Coppola told Jackass-star Chris Pontius, who played Marco's best friend in Somewhere, to keep adlibbing until Elle broke, cracked into a flood of sweet, genuine love-laughter. Paraphrased: "Most ballerina teachers are alcoholics. You don't know it cause you're young, but after you leave, they go in the back ..."

And the film displays real moments of sublime happiness. Some of the father-daughter scenes are nauseatingly happy; it's Marco's rawness to the world that opens up the chasms of the universe to such a sweet relationship with his daughter.

New Yorker film critic David Denby, who is sometimes dead wrong, concluded his unimpressed review with: "Mystification can become a crutch. At the moment, Coppola is an artist fixated on a single subject: this is her third film about an isolated soul living in a hotel. It’s time she risked losing her cool." In some ways I agree, but it's that cool that is so refreshing, attractive: it'd be interesting, compelling, approaching-genius, if Coppola took her sweet, aesthetic eye and turned it to less ethereal realms. Then, those sweet buds, in relationship to their full complements (the rest of their stalk, soil, sun), would really flower.