Somewhere

Venice (In Competition) – A jaded film star scratches out an isolated existence in the depersonalised environs of a hotel room, before a young girl breathes fresh hope into his lonely life – does director Sofia Coppola deliver a fresh take on familiar material, or has something been lost in translation? Emma Rowley and Paul Martin check in, in order to check out Somewhere.

Emma - Sofia Coppola has an extraordinary sense of what people like to look at. She excels in anecdotal sequences that highlight the poignant and the ridiculous, filmed with the acumen and amused distance of an alien observer. Somewhere is rich in these moments but unlike those in Lost In Translation, they do not add up to anything greater.

This is partly down to the casting. Stephen Dorff is highly believable as the Hollywood star just beginning to go to seed: still perched at the top of the heap but with no real sense of why he's there any more. He's just not very likeable, emitting a vacant humourlessness that's as off-putting as B.O. Bill Murray charmed and finessed his way through Lost In Translation, adding lustre to his scenes and sympathy to the story arc. Without his lightness of touch, Coppola's magic evaporates, leaving behind only a gorgeous surface sheen.

But it's also down to the character Dorff plays, Johnny Marco, a nondescript pretty boy who seems to have been modelled on stereotypically '90s drama/thriller stars like Dorff himself. It is one thing to invite the audience to share in the inherent ludicrousness of a superstar's life – a police escort at the airport, a private swimming pool in his hotel suite, twin pole dancers smilingly performing cheesy routines for him in his bedroom on portable poles. It's quite another thing to ask us to sympathise with the emptiness of his unimaginably privileged existence. And that is the direction the story takes.

Somewhere ticks all of the Coppola boxes while somehow missing the point. There's a haziness to the concept that is reminiscent of some of the work of Bret Easton Ellis, another Hollywood insider who satirises a city and lifestyle that he simultaneously exploits and succumbs to. While the leisurely length and atmosphere of the scenes perfectly illustrates Marco's lounging, laid-back existence, Somewhere's audience may feel rather like the driver kept waiting while Marco indulges in a spontaneous booty call: a little tired of hanging around, and a little irritable at being left out in the cold.

Paul – The opening sequence of Somewhere, which sees the black Ferrari of Johnny Marco whizzing round an enclosed desert racing track, passing by a static camera periodically with a roar of its powerful engines, seems for the vast majority of the movie's running time to offer a fitting metaphor for this fourth feature from Sofia Coppola – of something not going anywhere. Coppola clearly intends the scene to reflect the somewhat miserable lot of Marco himself, yet it is hard to resist the temptation to view it as a suitable summary of a film apparently gripped by narrative inertia.

As it happens, Somewhere does eventually veer for the off-ramp, a manoeuvre which proves as disastrous as its writer-director's casting in The Godfather: Part III, with the final shot being a stinking cliché that is almost dizzying in the vertiginous heights of lameness to which it soars.

Though there are moments of charm in the interactions between Dorff's Marco and daughter Cleo (Elle Fanning), such as jamming to the Police on Rock Band, his is a difficult character to engage with, even looking fairly punchable in his ageing grunger get-up of loose checked shirt, five o'clock shadow and baggy jeans tucked into work boats. Marco might be miserable, but why should we care particularly when he could choose to change his lifestyle in the blink of one of his rich and famous eyes?

No-one forces him to amble round with a beer permanently in hand, no-one holds a gun to his head and makes him insert his penis in every available woman to cross his path, and no-one appears to have issued any diktats condemning him to live out his days in a room at Sunset Boulevard's Chateau Marmont. Shambling through Somewhere like some scruffy somnambulist, Marco proves an empty space on which to centre a movie, with the indications being that Coppola is less interested than ever in fashioning a story proper, in favour of providing a faint sketch of a life not worthy of attention.

Rating on a scale of 5 listless days floating on a lilo: 2.5

Release date: US = 22 December 2010, UK = 4 March 2011
Directed by: Sofia Coppola
Screenplay by: Sofia Coppola
Cast: Stephen Dorff, Elle Fanning, Chris Pontius, Michelle Monaghan
Cert: TBC
Running time: 98 minutes

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