Sofia Coppola's fourth feature, the controversial Venice's Golden Lion winner (as the head of jury that year was her ex Quentin Tarantino), SOMEWHERE, promulgates Coppola's aesthetic credo right in its first shot, a static shot patiently observing a black Ferrari running in circles on the race track in the desert, four circles later, our protagonist, a listless Hollywood personage Johnny Marco (Dorff) steps out, which heralds a standstill he cannot escape and suggests that a soupçon of forbearance is a sine qua non during the viewing process.
While a privileged life (with all its Tinseltown trappings) is vested to Johnny, a Hollywood movie star in his prime, he is, perversely, stricken by anhedonia and acedia, and Coppola's close-quarters camera watches his numb status at lengths but has little intention to vamp up the subject's tediousness and banality (sporadically, two voluptuous pole-dancing twins, an uncanny spell of dead silence when Johnny is latex-covered for his makeup transmogrification, plus a homoerotic massage incident, are the zenith in terms of its narrative conceit), a method one might extol for its pseudo-documentary resolution, but nevertheless, significantly cripples the film's essential watchablity, if you are not a fan of Stephen Dorff's bad-boy persona, chances are it would be a long 98 minutes to while away.
That dreadful mundaneness are potentially alleviated when Johnny’s 11-year-old daughter Cleo (Fanning) comes into the scene, cute as a bunny, a sylph-like Cleo obligingly brings a whiff of vitality and sensibility to Johnny’s empty life and through their resultant bonding time (including an award-collecting jaunt to Rome, which is beneficial to both the movie’s rhythm and a viewer’s diminishing attention span), a palatable tonal shift engenders and leads us to Johnny’s tearful confession of his existential crisis near the end, though, Coppola doesn’t coddle him with any easy solution in return, ergo, he must extricate himself off his own bat, and the ending can be read as an ouroboros to the beginning, stepping out and heading on, there might be still hope left for him anyway.
Taken from a distinctive male perspective, Coppola's meditative account of an ennui-overlapped individual deliberately and artfully sidelines plot development in favor of an understated mood of detachment that is bespoke of her central character, but the end product is still a snooze-fest stuck in the middle of the road, with little sparks fly.
referential entries: Coppola's THE BEGUILED (2017, 6.3/10), MARIE ANTOINETTE (2006, 7.0/10), LOST IN TRANSLATION (2003, 8.8/10).
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