The Film
Sofia Coppola’s films have always been growers for me. I wasn’t particularly enamored with either The Virgin Suicides or Lost in Translation on my first viewing, but my appreciation has grown steadily for each upon subsequent revisits. With her fourth feature, Somewhere, I expect to experience a similar phenomenon. Somewhere is certainly a companion piece to Lost in Translation, but with more subdued rhythms and a less obvious emotional core, making it even easier to dismiss the first time around if you’re not expecting something so delicate.
Like Lost in Translation, Somewhere is an examination of emptiness and ennui among the privileged, although in a slightly different milieu. Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff) is an enormously popular Hollywood star living in the Chateau Marmont hotel. His life is full of stimulation — driving fast cars, jet setting around the globe, staving off the hordes of beautiful women throwing themselves at him — but is simultaneously suffocating in its hollowness.
His life takes a bit of a detour with the arrival of his 11-year-old daughter Cleo (Elle Fanning), who begins to spend more and more time with him while her mother has a kind of emotional breakdown. The potential here for the precocious kiddo teaching dad what’s really important in life storyline is obvious, and fortunately avoided completely.
What we get instead are precisely observed moments — Johnny gets applied with old age makeup for a movie, he enjoys the company of a pair of twin pole dancers, he orders late-night gelato with his daughter.
Coppola allows almost every scene to really breathe, waiting several seconds (or more) beyond when we expect a cut. Some will call this pretentious or annoying or boring. But really, it’s an exercise in restraint, painting a portrait with fewer brushstrokes. It's a sensibility that allows the viewer to feel the emptiness in each frame. Harris Savides’ photography is frequently stunning in a relaxed, almost incidental way.
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