Year in Film: Sofia Coppola's Journey to Somewhere

But the biggest point of departure may be Somewhere’s soundtrack. Marie Antoinette essentially plays out as a series of music videos set to period-imperfect source cues from Adam Ant and the Strokes. That sensibility—MTV-influenced, but personal—has long been a Sofia Coppola trademark, dating back to the montages set to Heart singles in Virgin Suicides. Somewhere is short on both music and montage. It’s the first Sofia Coppola film that prizes natural, diegetic sound—including music that’s organically part of a scene, as in two sequences involving rent-a-strippers—over an artfully chosen, hipster-baiting soundtrack.

“I was getting kind of tired of movies that just have pop song after pop song as the score—I did that before,” Sofia says. “I wanted to see how little we could use music.” Some scenes are so quiet that sounds that otherwise would seem incidental almost boom on the soundtrack, as in a long take of Johnny in his hotel room, in which there’s so little going on that the sound of his cigarette burning almost seems to echo.

Details

The Year in Film
Year-End Results: New York Film Poll
Feature: 10 to Watch Out for in 2011
Feature: Hoberman's Top 10
Feature: Breakout Performances
Feature: Culture High
Feature: Girl on Girl Action Gets Screwed
Feature: The Year in Film

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Review: Celebrity Has Its Downside in Somewhere.

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• Somewhere (Movie)
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“I found sitting there smoking a cigarette with nothing [to say] one of the most challenging things,” Dorff says. “Because if I’m ‘acting’ for one second, the movie’s done.”

Somewhere is a film that asks us to pay non-withering attention to the ennui of the beautiful, rich and famous, made by a woman who is beautiful, rich and second-generation famous. That alone is enough to inspire knee-jerk negative reactions. When Somewherewon the top prize at the Venice Film Festival in September, where it was in competition against such formidable contenders as Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan and Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff, some journalists cried foul at the fact that the jury for the prize included Quentin Tarantino, whom Coppola dated briefly after divorcing Jonze and before taking up with Mars. (For her part, Sofia jokes that she would have assumed her past relationship with Tarantino would be a handicap, not a help.) Some Somewhere critics complain that “nothing happens” in the movie; others suggest she should have gone further with the avant-garde inspirations, studio-subsidiary distributor be damned. Coppola also has been accused of treading familiar ground: the story of a man at a crisis point, who has a relationship with a female 25 years his junior—in a luxury hotel? Again?

It’s fair to point to Somewhere’s resemblance to Lost in Translation, but the similarities between the films needn’t be pejorative. Somewhere seems to systematically revisit certain scenes and elements of Translation, but approaches them with added distance, wisdom and grace. A press conference scene that existed to mock a brainless starlet in Translation has been refashioned in Somewhere to show sympathy for the celebrity. Both films deal with a very specific side effect of fame: the loneliness of being wanted by strangers and yet having no one to talk to. Translation leavens that loneliness with wry comedy and by offering its sad actor the hope of a quasi-romance. There’s very little comedy in Somewhere, and in the world it describes, romantic relationships don’t exist; women offer Johnny only easy sex and angry texts. If Johnny’s complicated relationship with his preteen daughter is a temporary comfort, it’s also a reminder of his inability to sustain a connection or make a commitment of any kind.

In both films, the big event is that the characters, self-obsessed and wound too tight, lose themselves in a moment that can’t be sustained, but Translation and Somewhere milk ephemera for different emotional results. Lost in Translation’s Rorschach-blot conclusion may be ambiguous, but it’s undeniably exhilarating. At Somewhere’s equally enigmatic end, Johnny makes a Big, Symbolic, Potentially Life-Changing Gesture that could lead to positive change—but for the moment, more than ever, he’s rootless and utterly alone. The parallels between the two films point to their key difference: Sofia Coppola’s increasingly mature point of view.

With no permanent residence in L.A., Coppola and Mars and their kids have been living at the hotel while promoting Somewhere. Despite the hotel’s reputation, they’re not the odd domestic unit at the bacchanal; a fashion-industry friend of Sofia’s who also has a baby daughter has been living here with her own family for the past six months. “It’s been fun,” Sofia says, with genuine enthusiasm, in full mom mode and apparently loving it.

But change is in the air. In a few days, Sofia and family will head up to Napa for Christmas. After that, she’ll start to think about her next project. In an echo of her film’s highly symbolic ending, she tells me she’s just let go of one major tie to L.A. “I had an old Jaguar, and I recently sold it,” she says, wistfully. “I love cars, and I miss that part of L.A., driving around. I had it for like 10 years, but it was just sitting in a garage.” Is it a sign that she’s decisively put Los Angeles in her rearview mirror, so to speak? If so, she isn’t letting go completely. She smiles, almost conspiratorially.

“I sold it to a friend.”