Sofia Coppola
There a scene at the beginning of "Somewhere" which contains the nucleus the film. Johnny Mark (Stephen Dorff), the movie star who lives at the legendary Chateau Marmont hotel in Hollywood, and currently has a broken arm, you're looking in the exhibition room of a private lap-dance of two beautiful blondes identical (for the record are the twins Karissa and Kristina Shannon): do a little 'stunned, educated appreciation, even a mild applause - and then falls asleep (two of them, upside down clinging to their poles, slide down quietly, always upside down, like a cartoon). It is not an isolated incident: the latest Johnny falls asleep during foreplay with his mouth on the crotch of a belle who towed. Sofia Coppola - director and writer - provides a factual basis showing that he blended whiskey and drugs, however, is almost a form of narcolepsy.
Like all characters in the film, Johnny has lost . In the scene very funny interview (Sofia, daughter of Francis Ford Coppola, has grown into the film and knows what he speaks), in the midst of the welter of questions simultaneously trivial and absurd, a journalist asks: "Who is Johnny Mark? "- and he embarrassed" ... Ehm ...". We remember the mysterious messages insulting that he receives in the phone. Characteristically, it leaves unspecified the script author, since what interesting is that they reflect (or reveal) the questions that makes the protagonist, who the fuck you think you are? What the fuck's your problem? If it was a Dr. Jekyll could also imagine that if he sends them alone. Verily Sofia Coppola, who always play cards on the table, already opened the film, before the credits , shows his black Ferrari goes four times in a row along the lap of the track, to tell us that Johnny lives on Marco forced binary .
In a wonderful scene of hardship and displacement, the actor is in a laboratory to be of special effects to make the mold for making a mask. With his head turned into a monstrous plastic egg with only two holes for nostrils, waiting and motionless for 40 minutes (in the story, however the director keeps the camera fixed on him much longer than they would any other American director), while the sound amplifies the heavy breathing and swallowing her. Then test the mask, and sees in the mirror a realistic expectation of him as an old man. "Shit." The condition
prince in the cinema of Sofia Coppola is one of displacement. His basic question is "Where am I?" That has a disturbing tendency to turn into "Who am I?". There are directors who are fortunate enough to shoot a film whose title contains their whole world, she did with "Lost in Translation" - where the journey of Bill Murray Japan was the great metaphor of inner displacement. The offset is not the journey, the journey, however, translates it and magnifies it, like a magnifying glass. Descending ideal of Bill Murray, Stephen Dorrf in "Somewhere" moves only occasionally (but note that has an arm cast, a fracture, we might ask, does not resemble a trip?). Moreover the existential state of the characters of Sofia Coppola, passengers or less, and real estate. Although Johnny goes to Italy (to Telegatti!, The director regards with the same amused detachment of the bizarre Japanese in "Lost in Translation"), its reality is more authentic to sit motionless on the couch to look into space, his eyes covered by a film as, in a state of mild astonishment. He finds himself in the scenes of the hotel, the slowness of the time - that puzzled suspension - which is typical of the cinema of Sofia Coppola. The various beautiful half-naked women who perform the movie star take something dell'algida mise en scène suspended photographs of Helmut Newton.
The protagonists of Sofia Coppola disoriented - the "Virgin Suicides" of the first dazzling film Lost in Translation Bill Murray to Marie Antoinette at Versailles - all a dream "Altroquando, a somewhere, unclear to them, and generally unattainable. In this film, a kind of representative and inspiring at the same time this other dimension is eleven years old daughter Cleo (Elle Fanning), the former wife of Johnny's discharge because he wants to go about his business. Cleo is the embodiment of upper class girl polite and never arrogant. His watchful eyes, politely judgmental, displace his father and put in his daily life crisis of licentiousness (sometimes narcoleptic). Thanks to the wonderful script and interpretation, and the alchemy created between Stephen Dorff and Elle Fanning, the moments of everyday life (when Cleo cooking for him and his childhood friend, when they play underwater in the pool, when she says "Twilight") sono di assoluta dolcezza e insieme di stupefacente autenticità.
La scena nella parte iniziale di “Somewhere” in cui Cleo danza sui pattini sul ghiaccio è l'“altra danza” del film, contrappeso e contraltare della precedente, la lap-dance delle gemelle; Johnny all'inizio la guarda con la stessa espressione un po' vuota e si distrae – ma poi si appassiona. Fin dal primo momento Cleo rappresenta un “principio di realtà” che agisce sullo sbalestramento del padre – vedi il suo buon senso rispetto alla paranoia di Johnny circa le auto che li seguono. Se sulla carta tutto questo può far sorgere un sospetto di sceneggiatura eccessivamente conscia (che si ritrova nella scena in cui Johnny guarda Gandhi in a documentary on TV), is the naturalness of the character to justify it artistically. On this line the film is developed with musical clarity and simplicity, to lead, after a cathartic confrontation with the daughter of the protagonist, in a final taste of Antonioni and Wenders that leaves open all roads.
Sofia Coppola is the intersection of a poet with a sociologist - or half a sociologist, because it is not designed to analyze and reconstruct the rituals, such as Martin Scorsese, and yet it has a fulminating perspicacity in grasping an environment, an atmosphere, a mood. His whole way of making a film departs from that of his father. Francis Ford Coppola is Italian opera, maximalist, minimalist, and Sofia is American. Appears in all his films a detached view which uses a staging sober, almost cold, not much based on that. His gaze is both realistic and dreamlike, and this is to give that particular vibration through, metaphorically lights, each of his films.
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