Produced by: Fred Roos, Sofia Coppola, Francis Ford Coppola, Roman Coppola, Paul Rassam and G. Mac Brown.
Written by: Sofia Coppola.
Music by: Phoenix
Studio: American Zoetrope.
Year of release: 2010.
Run time: 98 Minutes.
Budget: $7 Million.
Gross revenue: $13, 936, 909.
I really loved Lost in Translation and accordingly, I thought I really loved Sofia Copolla as a director. I think it was the overall ambient realism of the film; it was so close to real life yet without being completely mundane. You know, you’ve got Scarlett Johansson and Bill Murray making this really intimate personal connection that they probably would never have made if it weren’t for the setting of the film, and yet you totally believe that the story could happen. It’s because the characters were so realistically portrayed that you became so attached to them. By the end of the film, it was almost as if they were real people. I daresay that if Bill Murray had of died in the end, it would have been the saddest film ever created. With the given ending, it must be content to rest as one of the saddest films ever created.
Somewhere is in a very similar style to Lost in Translation. I’ve yet to see Marie Antoinette, and I saw The Virgin Suicides so long ago I can’t even remember what it was about, so I’m not sure if this style of realism pervades Sofia Coppola’s entire oeuvre. However, if we were to go by Lost in Translation and Somewhere on their own, we can kind of uncover what Copolla is all about.
Existential angst is the big issue here, with a heaped teaspoon of ‘celebrity’ just to get the broth simmering well. In Somewhere, Stephen Dorff plays Johnny Marco, a tabloid celebrity who lives the high-life of a famous millionaire, which is actually made pretty mundane through Copolla’s lens. This is nowhere more apparent than in the scene where two blonde identical twin strippers perform a synchronised pole dance for our protagonist. Though popular culture has ingrained into the collective consciousness this idea of the super-sexy woman using her super-sexy pole to be super-sexy, Copolla forces us to watch the entirety of the dance sequence and it’s actually quite clumsy and awkward looking. Apparently, Johnny agrees with us, because he passes out in the middle of it. Scenes like this deconstruct all the media out there that depicts the celebrity life as fabulous and awe-inspiring. It reminds the viewer that real life can never be like life as depicted in movies, and even (perhaps especially) in reality television.
Dancing serves as a recurring visual motif in Somewhere, with the above mentioned pole-dancing twins routine juxtaposed with the much sweeter figure skating of Marco’s estranged daughter, played brilliantly by Elle Fanning. I struggled to come up with what such a motif could mean and settled on the idea that Marco is so saturated by women who want to perform for him that he can’t even tell which performances are meaningful; whilst he can be forgiven for falling asleep during the pole-dancing, he is judged a little more harshly for sending text messages during his daughter’s figure skating routine.
It’s all very bleak stuff, however the question I think every film-maker must ask before they commence a project is whether or not it’s engaging enough to hold the attention of the audience. This is where Somewhere falls down a bit. I don’t think it’s a complete train wreck by any means, but there was just something so sweet about the intimacy between Scarlett Johansson and Bill Murray in Lost in Translation that was missing in this film. You do get a little bit of tenderness between Marco and his daughter, but it’s just not as good. I’m not saying that Copolla should be restricted to composing endless variations on a similar riff, but I just don’t think that Somewhere reaches the same level as Lost in Translation, which was quite simply a classic film in the true sense of the word.
A few critics condemned Somewhere as the whining of a privileged brat, and I think such allegations are unfair, because Copolla’s celebrity background provides insight into what is really a unique situation: A man who is allowed to remain a child by virtue of an over-paid and perhaps under-demanding career. If he were a working class man, he would be forced to grow up in order to pay the bills. French magazine Le Monde expressed it far more eloquently when they said that Somewhere details “...the delicate irony of the delinquency of a universe of the happy few.”
Three and a half stars:
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