Screen Machine

Review: Somewhere

Ever since Sofia Coppola staked her claim as queen of the Hollywood indie scene in the late ‘90s, the criticisms leveled at her have remained the same across what is now arguably an auteurist body of work. Unsurprisingly, the critical response to her latest effort, Somewhere, has been no exception. When Somewhere took out the Golden Lion at last year’s Venice Film Festival (its jury headed by her ex-squeeze Quentin Tarantino), Coppola’s detractors were quick to trumpet their well-worn accusations – that it is her Hollywood pedigree, rather than her directorial talents, that have dictated the rise-and-rise of her star; that her filmmaking favors style over substance; and that her sullen characters, much like Coppola herself, suffer only the affliction of too much money and too much time. Apparently the children of the Hollywood elite have no business with melancholy.

With Somewhere, Coppola confronts these criticisms head on by placing them centre screen. Set in California’s Chateau Marmont, this depiction of the relationship between a jaded action star Johnny Marco (Steven Dorff) and his 11-year old daughter Cleo (Elle Fanning) clearly resonates with Coppola’s own star-studded childhood. Johnny may be Coppola’s first male protagonist, but in many ways, this is her most autobiographical film to date. The film’s opening image, a still frame of a Ferrari circling a racetrack, is clearly a visual metaphor for our protagonist’s present – stuck in circles and repetitions, hurtling forward but going nowhere. Johnny’s alarm clock is a wake-up call from his publicist, detailing his daily schedule of photo shoots, press junkets and award ceremonies. His hotel room is a perpetual party, filled with hangers-on and an endless cast of unnamed beauties who throw themselves at his feet. Strippers even offer home delivery, bringing portable poles to the foot of his bed and lulling him to sleep with their rhythmic gyrations. Yet in the rare moments he escapes from this celebrity circus, Johnny simply sits alone, chain-smoking and staring into space, his sense of self apparently non-existent beyond his star persona. When a journalist at a press conference asks him, “Who is the real Johnny Marco?”, he can only reply “Ummm…”

It is the unannounced arrival of Johnny’s tween daughter Cleo, left on his doorstep while her mother goes on an impromptu vacation, that interrupts the stasis of his routinised existence, and forces him to confront his spiritual vacuity. Played by Elle Fanning (Dakota’s younger sister), Cleo fits the mould of Coppola’s waifish and ethereal heroines. She could easily pass as a Lisbon sister – teetering on that Lolita-like precipice of adolescence, in equal measures gangly and graceful, blissfully unaware of herown sexuality or the meanings this will too soon entail. And like all Coppola’s heroines, there is something about Cleo that remains intangible and unknowable to the men around her (here, her father). Indeed, the teenage narrator in The Virgin Suicides’ musings on the Lisbon girls could easily describe the parent-child reversal that occurs between Johnny and Cleo – “we knew the girls were really women in disguise; that they understood love, and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them”. Coppola conveys the nuances of this relationship with exquisite subtlety. The shots of Cleo ice-skating visually mirror that of the pole-dancers who visit Johnny’s hotel. Although this doubling should create an uncomfortable perversity, it moreso conveys Johnny’s naivety. The twin strippers’ synchronized routine, choreographed to ‘My Hero’ by The Foo Fighters, is almost as asexual as Cleo’s icy pirouettes. Johnny watches both with the same troubled bemusement, while the women themselves remain forever just beyond his reach.

As counterpoint to Marie Antoinette’s excesses (and perhaps also its critical reception, infamously booed at its Cannes premiere), Somewhere is an exercise in minimalism. The narrative unfolds slowly through still frames, long takes and sparse dialogue; non-diegetic music doesn’t make an entrance until well after the midway mark. Similarly, there are no grand statements to be found here. Much like the final scene of Lost in Translation, dialogue promising narrative resolution goes unheard by the audience – Johnny’s only emotional avowal is obscured by the beat of a helicopter’s wings. It is instead in the moments of the everyday that Coppola creates meaning – Cleo cooking her father elaborate meals; their knowing glances over breakfast; the duo reclining poolside, arm in arm. In these simple gestures, Coppola is able to create poignancy without fireworks, culminating in what I would argue is her best film to date.

Again and again, Coppola’s characters find themselves stuck in milieus so insular that they become suffocating – the Lisbon family home in The Virgin Suicides, a Tokyo hotel in Lost in Translation and the Palace of Versailles in Marie Antoinette. But in Somewhere, Coppola reveals what these environments may have been stand-ins for all along – Hollywood, which she seemingly views as the most stifling vacuum of them all. Those who chastise her for this hermeticism are perhaps missing the point – that it is this exact isolation from ‘real world’ problems which is the source of her characters’ eternal ennui.

Rebecca Harkins-Cross is a freelance arts journalist based in Melbourne. She holds a B.A. (Media and Communications) from the University of Melbourne, majoring in Cinema Studies, and recently completed an honours degree in literature.

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