Not Going Anywhere

We hear the sound of a roaring motor car engine on an empty race track. A car zooms past from screen left to screen right, disappears, re-appears a few seconds later at screen right but on the track at the upper quarter of the screen, zooms past and disappears at screen left. This is repeated three or four times. The car stops at the lower end of the screen. It is a black sports car. A man emerges at the nearside of the car. He's a young man in a white T-shirt over which is an unbuttoned blue checkered shirt over which is a head with some unshaved stubble on his face and a head of chestnut blonde hair with hair deliberately cut to look unkempt. He opens the boot of the car in front and to get something in and out. He drives back to an LA hotel, Chateau Marmont, where he occupies one of its numerous small rooms.

In the next scene, we find two scantily clad girls doing a pole dance. Watching them was that same young man popped up against some white pillows with a can of beer in his hands in his hotel bedroom. They finished and left. He flickers on the TV, some 30's black and white film was being shown. He gets a call from some one called Margie, whom we learn is probably his agent and manager. We are next shown the man in a PR exercise with an anxious field assistant ushering him in with last minute details of what he is supposed to do. He listens half-heartedly. It was a press conference filled with photojournalists with light bulbs flashing and camera shutters clicking like mad. His dark hair young female counterpart in the photo shoot knows him and says he was not very good. He half acknowledges it. It does'nt appear to bother him at all. He just carries on following the directions of the photographers as to how to lift his head and what kind of expression to put on. The shooting sessions ends. He drives back to the hotel again.

The young man continues to drink, take his pills, watch his TV, ask for massage service and for the pole dance pair to come again but falls asleep during their performance. Occasionally he has some casual sex with such girls as offer themselves. Suddenly, he got a call. His 11 year old daughter is coming. He drives her to an ice skating rink where his daughter does a wonderful performance with beautiful ballet like movements and mid-air pirouettes. He asks her when she started learning doing ice skating. She tells him she has already done so for two years! He says she is good, and puts up his thumb. But one can see there was no enthusiasm nor convinction in what he says. We learn that he is divorced with custody given to his wife and occasional access right to him.

He is in fact a top Hollywood male movie star (as distinguished from an actor) and has been invited to Italy for another promotion effort for his latest film, is accompanied everywhere by nosy photographers and welcomed by his fans. His name is suggestive: Johnny Marco, the first part, the individual part, American and the latter part, his surname, Italian. He is given an excellent room in a luxury Italian hotel with a private marble swimming pool. He swims with her daughter and does some fun things under water. That was the only time when he appears to be genuinely and spontaneously happy. Is that a symbol of where he could find happiness, in the fluid condition of water and where he was at the bottom of the pool: that he must go down the swimming pool of his psyche? Later, he appears on a glamorous stage in which there was a bevy of scantily clad blondes doing almost exactly the same type of pole dance without poles which we see at the start of the film, using almost exactly the same type of body postures, selling sex under the pretext of glamour, enveloped in gold sequin instead of very brief tennis outfits, as in the bedroom pole dance.

Later we are shown a scene in which her daughter is tired, falls asleep on his shoulders after some teenage "fun" game which he plays with her and in which he dares not wake her up: a very touching scene. During one of his PR and party stints, he is plagued by a young aspiring actor about the secret of his success. He reflects for a while but has nothing to say. We are shown some other PR episodes and more drinking, partying, laying other willing chicks. He meets a good looking young lady looking for sex, gets into a room, kisses her apparently passionately, according to the lady 's voice in the dark, but right in the middle of it, falls asleep. 

The film ends, with the camera following him whilst he was driving in one of LA's highways to the suburbs, cruising at high speed in his black sports car, after sedning his daughter off to a camp. He stops in the middle of it, goes out, head down. The road continues as far as the eye can see to the distant horizon. What will he do now that his daughter, whom he did not expect will become attached to him, is dumped upon him? He did not know what to do, a typical modern day conclusion to a film in which nothing is concluded. The film started with his car going about in circles. At the end of the film it is at least going straigtht, into the unknown.

This Golden Lion award best film at the Venice Film Festival 2010, called Somewhere is written and directed by Sofia Coppola and stars Stephen Dorff, Elle Fanning and Chris Pontius. I saw it Sunday evening. The director seems to want to portray the emptiness behind the glamour of a Hollywood male star promoted for his looks. On the surface, the Hollywood movie star Johnny Marco, played by Stephen Dorff,  has got everything that he can possibly want: money, sex, fame and popularity. But his private life is in shambles. He has no hobbies, only one real friend who seems more interested in playing with and talking to his daughter, Cleo, played by Elle Fanning, than he does. He does try to make an effort, but one can see that he has no real interest in it. There is always that disinterested and tired look on his face. He has got everything but is passionate about nothing. His only passion seems his driving: at least, he bothers to go to a race track to get his adrenalin pumping on the tracks.

The car may be the symbol of his life. The films starts with the sports car and ends with it. The car was stopping in the middle of nowhere (the "somewhere" in the title?) and he has no idea of what he wants after discovering that he is stuck with his daughter. It was filmed throughout in largely medium shots, not too close, not too far, with occasional close ups. Perhaps the director was trying to make a statement, what she thinks an objective statement, without comment, either by the camera or through the mouth of any of the other characters, a very Hemingway style of story transcribed into celluloid but somehow, it seems to me to lack a unity of moods, of sentiments and as a result to lack a certain centralizing focus which ties everything together.

The only thing which appears to give the life of the protagonist some kind of meaning appears to be his daughter, dumped upon him without any prior warning by her mother who said that she was going away somewhere, but did not say where nor when and even whether she would return. But even with his daughter, his efforts seems half hearted.

The sports car could have been a symbol in that we are shown numerous scenes in which the principal actor is driving around to various parts of Hollywood and LA but that fact was not sufficiently emphasized. It was so subtle that it runs the risk of being lost. Is the director trying to say that the principal actor and his sports car are one: something powerful but mechanical but ultimately a mere instrument: powered by other interests: the interest of money and the need for media exposure. Is the sports car and the fast but superficial and totally mechanical life a symbol of American high life in general? If so, I cannot see how this theme has been developed.

The acting is good, though. The hero shows the blasé and tired attitude in everything and to everyone well. His tragedy is the tragedy of a man of action whose action is reduced almost entirely to that of his appearance and his image and his other- directed instead of self-generated mechanical motion. There was a scene in which he was asked to remain motionless for about 45 minutes while his face was being literally "moulded" in plaster, for later use in the role of an old man! He is completely passive, like a glamorous version of a rag doll on strings. As it is, he has as much depth as the thickness of the celluloid on which his image is projected on to the movie screen. There was a scene in which he tells his daughter that he never reads or studies the script that he was given and asks her to read it for him. Maybe he finds life meaningless because he never bothers to read carefully the script of his own life? Does he have one, even if he bothers to read it? I wonder! 

I also like the acting of Elle, who got a well deserved award, merely slightly overplayed the cute teenage daughter. The cinema work is OK but not outstanding.  The music is unobstrusive but certainly nothing to rave about. Not only is the hero not going anywhere. He is followed by the director, who trails after that sport car. She gets little further than its protagonist. Perhaps a little, but not much. To me, it seems the main problem is the problem of the rhythm of the film. Everything seems to get equal treatment and appears to be given roughly the same amount of time. There were a few shots in which the camera deliberately slows down and pans out from the listless actor floating on the surface of a swimming pool to increase the emotional impact and perhaps to highlight the fact that he was merely drifting upon the surface of his emotions in an artificial environment and was relying upon an inflated raft instead of floating on his own strength but there was not enough focus on the face or the eyes or some other features of the hero's face or body to indicate the emotions within or on the artificial raft to bring home that impact. A brave but in the last analysis failed attempt at an art film in the commercial environment of Hollywood. Is its award the result of behind the scene cinematic politics because the director is an Italian woman and the daughter the famous Francis Ford Coppola?