You need a bit of patience to get on with Somewhere, Sofia Coppola’s latest movie. Or, if not patience, then a relatively relaxed frame of mind, for this is a film without the usual forward-driving plotline or moments of explosive excitement.
As with her previous movies, Lost in Translation and Marie Antoinette, Coppola is more interested in human minutiae, in the plod of quotidian existence, than in conventional movie narrative. In a way, she’s more of a European director than she is an American.
Stephen Dorff, a faded pretty boy who never quite made it into the top echelon of Hollywood stardom, plays — well, if not himself, then a movie star who never quite made it into the top echelon of Hollywood stardom.
Nonetheless, he can still spend his time loafing around the Chateau Marmont, a fashionably bohemian residential Los Angeles hotel for actors and rock stars; between press calls and other obligations he goes to parties or gets pairs of pole dancers on room service. The vacuity of his life is slowly demonstrated, illustrating what the opening sequence strongly implies: there, a black Ferrari is being driven round and round a desert track. And round, and round, and round — testing the viewer’s patience from the first, or perhaps just starting as it means to go on.
Two things are happening here. First, a clear symbol is being presented, and we can then follow the fortunes of the Ferrari through the film if we need a symbolic handle on the story. Second, Coppola is accustoming the viewer to her cinematic and narrative technique, which is basically to allow the camera to keep watching something for far longer than it would usually: three times round the track would suffice in an ordinary American movie, but Coppola wants us to feel the repetition, and to get used to the idea of simply watching the action, letting it unfold as if naturally, rather than expecting the hectic cut-cut-cut of Hollywood style to manipulate our responses for us.
In this, I found Somewhere a welcome change from the usual clichés and conventions. I liked its detachment, its looseness and even its laziness — laziness as a chosen style rather than a moral issue. Johnny Marco, Dorff’s character, is rather upstaged by Cleo, his daughter (Elle Fanning), and that’s right, too, in terms of the storyline; she has a kind of drive he lacks, a more powerful inner existence. Scenes of relatively ordinary life, such as cooking and playing video games, become the heart of the film, however underplayed they may be.
The title of the film may reference the Stephen Sondheim song, pointing to the characters’ wish that there may be “a place for us”, that they may even find “a new way of living”. But it is also delicately specific in its lack of specificity, and that’s a pretty good way to describe the film itself. It’s not about Oz, about the somewhere that exists “over the rainbow”; there’s no fantasy land to escape to. Just an ordinary road, going — somewhere.