Somewhere opens with the sight of movie star Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff) driving his black Ferrari around and around a circular track – a visual encapsulation of his repetitive go-nowhere life, as well as of writer/director Sophia Coppola’s habitual return to favored themes and imagery. In this companion piece to Lost in Translation, Johnny spends his days and nights in a surreal celebrity fugue, being shuttled to and from PR events notable for their unreal absurdity (at a press conference, he’s asked about “post-modern colonialism” and his workout habits), stumbling home to find parties going on at his apartment, and being constantly confronted with half-nude women eager to spend the night. Though the film eventually has Johnny reach an introspective epiphany after caring for his eleven-year-old daughter Cleo (Elle Fanning) – whose adoration for her father is mixed with disdain for his womanizing ways – Coppola isn’t after a sturdy narrative arc as much as snapshots of high-life ennui, all of which revolve around the unfulfilled Johnny’s alienation from others, the world and himself. Somewhere is akin to a collage that hammers home the same points with diminishing returns, but it’s also a sumptuously stylish and moderately affecting mood piece, as when Johnny passively watches twins perform choreographed pole-dance routines in his bedroom (during the first, he can barely stay awake; during the second, he mistakes one girl for the other). Coppola’s framing conveys an underlying sense of Johnny’s dissonant detachment from his transient hotel-limo-airport environments, and thus sets an atmosphere of soul-crushing languor even while her film – as with a centerpiece zoom into Johnny’s face encased in plaster that symbolizes his isolated condition – proves content to merely restate its points in increasingly obvious ways.
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