Sometimes, we are in the midst of a transition, getting lost in their status quo. That makes us lonely and empty, so we are trying to find something that make ourselves numb in order to avoid the emptiness. However,life won’t make it easy for them, we still have to go back to the reality.
DRIFTING BETWEEN • TABLE OF CONTENTS
01
Table of Contents 03
11
Chapter 1
23
Chapter 3
Sofia Coppola
Film Reviews
Biography Filmography Awards & Nominations
The Virgin Suicides Lost in Translation Marie Antoinette Somewhere
Chapter 2 The Film Festival The Film Festival Date & Location Venue Story Schedule Feature Films
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Chapter 1
Sofia Coppola Biography Filmography Awards & Nomination
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Biography As the daughter of the famous director Francis Ford Coppola who made The Godfather films, Sofia Coppola is a screenwriter, producer, director and actor. She wrote and directed the 1999 film The Virgin Suicides. Her directorial work for Lost in Translation won an Oscar. In 2010, she became the first American woman to win the Golden Lion, the top prize at the Venice Film Festival. Early Life Director, producer, screenwriter and actor Sofia Coppola was born on May 14, 1971, in New York City. The daughter of famed Godfather director Francis Ford Coppola, Sofia made brief appearances in her father’s films throughout her childhood. Acting, however, would not prove to be Sofia’s strong suit, as evidenced in her performance in the third installment of The Godfather. Cast at the last minute as Mary Corleone, Coppola was ruthlessly panned by critics for her stiff and false portrayal.
Personal Life Married to director Spike Jonze in 1999, Coppola separated from her first husband in 2003. The couple was later divorced. In 2006, Coppola had a child with boyfriend Thomas Mars, a French singer. The couple named their daughter Romy.
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Film Career Following this experience, Sofia retreated from the spotlight, enrolling in the fine arts program at the California Institute of Arts, concentrating on her photography, experimenting with costume and fashion design and contributing to her brother Roman’s film efforts. In 1993, however, she began writing the screenplay adaptation of Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides. Starring James Woods, Kathleen Turner and Kirsten Dunst, the subtle,
haunting film was an overwhelming critical and art house success. Coppola made headlines again in 2003 when she debuted Lost In Translation, a film she both wrote and directed. With veteran comic actor Bill Murray as her muse, the film tells the story of two Americans strangers: one a young new wife, the other an American movie star turned whisky pitchman struggling to find kinship and meaning in life during a chance meeting in a hotel in Japan. In 2004, Coppola won an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for the film. Sofia Coppola’s Wnext film wasn’t as universally well received as its predecessor. Coppola wrote, directed and produced the imaginative reinvention of a classic figure from French history in 2006’s Marie Antoinette. Starring Kirsten Dunst as the title character, the film earned some positive reviews, but it failed to catch on with movie audiences. It was praised its stunning visuals, rock soundtrack and Dunst’s portrayal of the self-absorbed teenage royal. The film was nominated for an Academy Award for Outstanding Achievement in Costume Design.
Filmography As Director
1999
As Actress
1999
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Somewhere
Star Wars: Episode I: The Phantom Menace Peggy Sue Got Married Faerie Tale Theatre: The Princess Who Had Never Laughed
The Godfather Part II
The Virgin Suicides
The Godfather Part III A Very Murray Christmas Lost in Translation Frankenweenie
The Godfather
The Cotton Club Tucker: The Man and His Dream
Marie Antoinette The Beguiled
The Outsiders
Lick the Star
Rumble Fish Anna CQ
2017
201
2013
2010
2006
2003
2001
1999
1998
1992
1990
1988
1987
1986
1984
1983
1974
1972
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The Bling Ring
Inside Monkey Zetterland
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Awards & Nominations 2000 Las Vegas Film Critics Society Awards Nominated Best Director Best Screenplay Best Female Newcomer The Virgin Suicides 2001 Young Hollywood Awards Won Best Director Lost in translation 2003 New York Film Critics Circle Awards Won Best Director Lost in translation 2003 Venice Film Festival Won Lina Mangiacapre Award Lost in translation 2003 Athens International Film Festival Won Golden Athena Lost in Translation
2003 Awards Circuit Community Awards Won Best Original Screenplay Lost in Translation Nominated Best Motion Picture Lost in Translation Best Director Lost in Translation
2004 Academy Awards, USA Won Best Writing, Original Screenplay Lost in Translation Nominated Best Picture Lost in Translation Best Director Lost in Translation
2005 César Awards, France Won Directors Guild of America, USA A Very Murray Christmas
2004 Chicago Film Critics Association Awards Won Best Screenplay Lost in Translation Nominated Best Director Lost in Translation
2004 Italian National Syndicate of Film Journalists Won Best Foreign Director Lost in Translation
2010 Venice Film Festival Won Golden Lion Lost in translation
2004 Las Vegas Film Critics Society Nominated Best Director Best Screenplay Lost in Translation
2011 Alliance of Women Film Journalists Nominated Best Woman Director Somewhere Nominated Best Woman Screenwriter Somewhere
2004 Chlotrudis Awards Won Best Director Lost in Translation 2004 Florida Film Critics Circle Awards Won Best Screenplay Lost in Translation 2004 Independent Spirit Awards Won Best Feature Best Director Best Screenplay Lost in Translation 2004 International Cinephile Society Awards Won Best Original Screenplay Lost in Translation
2004 BAFTA Awards Nominated Best Film Lost in Translation Nominated Best Screenplay-Original Lost in Translation 2004 Golden Globes, USA Won Best Screenplay-Motion Picture Lost in Translation Nominated Best Director-Motion Picture Lost in Translation
2005 Bodil Awards Won Best American Filmy Lost in Translation
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2003 Boston Society of Film Critics Awards Won Best Director Lost in Translation
2004 American Screenwriters Association, USA Nominated Discover Screenwriting Award Lost in Translation 2004 Australian Film Institute Nominated Best Foreign Film Lost in Translation
Chapter 2
The Film Festival The Film Festival Date & Location Venue Story Schedule Costume Exhibition Feature Films
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The Film Festival “I’m always a sucker for a love story.”
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Drifting Between is an American film festival that takes place in The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater at MoMA, New York and it is co-organized by Women In Film (WIF), a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting equal opportunities for women, encouraging creative projects by women, and expanding and enhancing portrayals of women in all forms of global media. It presents the films of Sofia Coppola. New York is the place where Sofia Coppola born, and people always hold a special bond with the place they spend their childhood, so we think this location gives a specifial meaning to this film festival. Sometimes, we are in the midst of a transition, getting lost in our status quo. That makes us lonely and empty, so we are trying to find something that make us numb in order to avoid the emptiness. However,life won’t make it easy for us, we still have to go back to the reality. In Sofia Coppola’s films, we can see the studies of Sofia Coppola that present how people struggling and getting lost in their lives.
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Date & Location 3/15/2016–3/16/2016 The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater at MoMA, 11 W. 53rd St., New York, NY 100203 Sofia Coppola was born in New York City, and she spent her childhood in New York. People always hold a special bond with the place they spend their childhood.
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Venue Story The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater II is the generous gift of Mr. and Mrs. Roy Titus, who, in 1977, also made the museum the gift of the Roy and Niuta Titus Theater I, now undergoing renovation. At the completion of The Museum of Modern Art’s Expansion Program in October 1983, the Department of Film will be able to screen film series in two theaters with a combined capacity of 689 seats.
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Costume Exhibition
Schedule
A good costume design should be able to tell the story solely through dress, creating an interdependence between the costume and the character, both becoming two inseparable parts of a same whole. During the film festival, you will have chance to take a closer look at those exquisite costume in the film of Marie Antoinette. Every element in the costumes is played to depict visually the character’s inner feelings and struggles throughout the movie. Clothes are a key feature in the construction of a character’s identity and a very powerful tool for the filmmaker to tell a story. The costumes are made to support the narrative; every costume, every accessory, every hairstyle is a deliberate choice (or should be) made by the designer to visualize the character’s story.
May 15th 2:00 pm 3:00 pm 4:00 pm 6:30 pm 7:00 pm 9:00 pm
Opening Party Director’s Talk Screening: The Virgin Suicides Actors’ Talk Screening: Lost in Translation Director’s Talk
May 16th Costume Exhibition Screening: Marie Antoinette Screening: Somewhere Director’s Talk
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2:00 pm 4:00 pm 7:00 pm 9:00 pm
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Feature Films
Lost in Translation
On the surface the Lisbons appear to be a normal 1970s family living in a middle-class Michigan suburb. Mr. Lisbon is a quirky math teacher, his wife is a strictly religious mother of five attractive teenage daughters who catch the eyes of the neighborhood boys. However, when 13-year-old Cecilia commits suicide, the family spirals downward into a creepy state of isolation and the remaining girls are quarantined from social interaction (particularly from the opposite sex) by their zealously protective mother. But the strategy backfires, their seclusion makes the girls even more intriguing to the obsessed boys who will go to absurd lengths for a taste of the forbidden fruit.
Bob Harris (Bill Murray) and Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) are two Americans in Tokyo. Bob is a movie star in town to shoot a whiskey commercial, while Charlotte is a young woman tagging along with her workaholic photographer husband (Giovanni Ribisi). Unable to sleep, Bob and Charlotte cross paths one night in the luxury hotel bar. This chance meeting soon becomes a surprising friendship. Charlotte and Bob venture through Tokyo, having often hilarious encounters with its citizens, and ultimately discover a new belief in life’s possibilities.
Marie Antoinette “All eyes will be on you,” says the Austrian Empress, Maria Theresa to her youngest daughter Marie Antoinette. The film, marketed for a teen audience, is an impressionistic retelling of Marie Antoinette’s life as a young queen in the opulent and eccentric court at Versailles. The film focuses on Marie Antoinette, as she matures from a teenage bride to a young woman and eventual queen of France.
Somewhere Hollywood actor Johnny Marco, nested in his luxury hotel of choice, is a stimulated man. Drinking, parties and women keep a creeping boredom under wraps in between jobs. He is the occasional father of a bright girl, Cleo, who may be spoiled but doesn’t act it. When Cleo’s mother drops her off and leaves town, Johnny brings her along for the ride, but can he fit an 11-year-old girl into his privileged lifestyle?
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The Virgin Suicides
Chapter 3
Film Reviews The Virgin Suicides Lost in Translation Marie Antoinette Somewhere
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The Virgin Suicides Director: Sofia Coppola Writers: Jeffrey Eugenides (novel), Sofia Coppola Stars: Kirsten Dunst, Josh Hartnett, James Woods Release Date: 19 May 2000
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There is a time in the adolescent season of every boy when a particular girl seems to have materialized in his dreams, with backlighting from heaven. Sofia Coppola’s “The Virgin Suicides” is narrated by an adult who speaks for “we”--for all the boys in a Michigan suburban neighborhood 25 years ago, who loved and lusted after the Lisbon girls. We know from the title and the opening words that the girls killed themselves. Most of the reviews have focused on the girls. They miss the other subject--the gawky, insecure yearning of the boys. The movie is as much about those guys, “we,” as about the Lisbon girls. About how Trip Fontaine (Josh Hartnett), the leader of the pack, loses his baby fat and shoots up into a junior stud who is blindsided by sex and beauty, and dazzled by Lux Lisbon (Kirsten Dunst), who of the perfect Lisbon girls is the most perfect. In every class there is one couple who has sex while the others are only talking about it, and Trip and Lux make love on the night of the big dance. But that is not the point. The point is that she wakes up the next morning, alone, in the middle of the football field. And the point is that Trip, as the adult narrator, remembers not only that “she was the still point of the turning world then” and “most people never taste that kind of love” but also, “I liked her a lot. But out there on the football field, it was different.” Yes, it was. It was the end of adolescence and the beginning of a lifetime of compromises, disenchantments and real things. First sex is ideal only in legend. In life
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In a way, the Lisbon girls and the neighborhood boys never existed, except in their own adolescent imaginations. to them is not the point. Their disappearance is the point. One moment they were smiling and bowing in their white dresses in the sun, and the next they were gone forever. The lack of any explanation is the whole point: For those left behind, they are preserved forever in the perfection they possessed when they were last seen. “The Virgin Suicides” is Sofia Coppola’s first film, based on the much-discussed novel by Jeffrey Eugenides. She has the courage to play it in a minor key. She doesn’t hammer home ideas and interpretations. She is content with the air of mystery and loss that hangs in the air like bitter poignancy. Tolstoy said all happy families are the same. Yes, but he should have added, there are hardly any happy families. To live in a family group with walls around it is unnatural for a species that evolved in tribes and villages. What would work itself out in the giveand-take of a community gets grotesque when allowed to fester in the hothouse of a single-family home. A mild-mannered teacher and a strongwilled woman turn into a paralyzed captive and a harridan. Their daughters see themselves as captives of these parents, who hysterically project their own failure upon the children. The worship the girls receive from the neighborhood boys confuses them: If they are perfect, why are they seen as such flawed and dangerous creatures? And then the reality of sex, too young, peels back the innocent idealism and reveals its secret engine, which is animal and brutal, lustful and contemptuous.
In a way, the Lisbon girls and the neighborhood boys never existed, except in their own adolescent imaginations. They were imaginary creatures, waiting for the dream to end through death or adulthood. “Cecilia was the first to go,” the narrator tells us right at the beginning. We see her talking to a psychiatrist after she tries to slash her wrists. “You’re not even old enough to know how hard life gets,” he tells her. “Obviously, doctor,” she says, “you’ve never been a 13-yearold girl.” No, but his profession and every adult life is to some degree a search for the happiness she does not even know she has.
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it attaches plumbing, fluids, gropings, fumblings and pain to what was only an hour ago a platonic ideal. Trip left Lux not because he was a pig, but because he was a boy and broken with grief at the loss of his—their—dream. And when the Lisbon girls kill themselves, do not blame their deaths on their weird parents. Mourn for the passing of everyone you knew and everyone you were in the last summer before sex. Mourn for the idealism of inexperience. “The Virgin Suicides” provides perfunctory reasons that the Lisbon girls might have been unhappy. Their mother (Kathleen Turner) is a hysteric so rattled by her daughters’ blooming sexuality that she adds cloth to their prom dresses until they appear in “four identical sacks.” Their father (James Woods) is the well-meaning but emasculated high school math teacher who ends up chatting about photosynthesis with his plants. These parents look gruesome to us. All parents look gruesome to kids, and all of their attempts at discipline seem unreasonable. The teenage years of the Lisbon girls are no better or worse than most teenage years. This is not the story of daughters driven to their deaths. The story it most reminds me of, indeed, is “Picnic at Hanging Rock” (1975), about a party of young girls, not unlike the Lisbon sisters in appearance and sexual experience, who go for a school outing one day and disappear into the wilderness, never to be seen again. Were they captured? Killed in a fall? Trapped somehow? Bitten by snakes? Simply lost in the maze of nature? What happened
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Lost in Translation Director: Sofia Coppola Writers: Sofia Coppola Stars: Bill Murray, Scarlett Johansson, Giovanni Ribisi Release Date: 3 October 2003
SOFIA COPPOLA • FILM FESTIVAL
Murray plays Bob Harris, an American movie star in Japan to make commercials for whiskey. “Do I need to worry about you, Bob?” his wife asks over the phone. “Only if you want to,” he says. She sends him urgent faxes about fabric samples. Johansson plays Charlotte, whose husband John is a photographer on assignment in Tokyo. She visits a shrine and then calls a friend in America to say, “I didn’t feel anything.” Then she blurts out: “I don’t know who I married.” She’s in her early 20s, Bob’s in his 50s. This is the classic set-up for a May-November romance, since in the mathematics of celebrity intergenerational dating you can take five years off the man’s age for every million dollars of income. But “Lost in Translation” is too smart and thoughtful to be the kind of movie where they go to bed and we’re supposed to accept that as the answer. Sofia Coppola, who wrote and directed, doesn’t let them off the hook that easily. They share something as personal as their feelings rather than something as generic as their genitals. These are two wonderful performances. Bill Murray has never been better. He doesn’t play “Bill Murray” or any other conventional idea of a movie star, but invents Bob Harris from the inside out, as a man both happy and sad with his life–stuck, but resigned to being stuck. Marriage is not easy for him, and his wife’s voice over the phone is on autopilot. But he loves his children. They are miracles, he confesses to Charlotte. He is very tired, he is doing the commercials for money and hates himself for it, he has a sense of hu-
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studied the admirable Japanese achievements in porno. And the B-movie starlet (Anna Faris), intoxicated with her own wonderfulness. In these scenes there are opportunities for Murray to turn up the heat under his comic persona. He doesn’t. He always stays in character. He is always Bob Harris, who could be funny, who could be the life of the party, who could do impressions in the karaoke bar and play games with the director of the TV commercial, but doesn’t because being funny is what he does for a living, and right now he is too tired and sad to do it for free. Except ... a little. That’s where you see the fine-tuning of Murray’s performance. In a subdued, fond way, he gives us wry faint comic gestures, as if to show what he could do, if he wanted to. We shouldn’t be allowed to hear it. It’s between them, and by this point in the movie, they’ve become real enough to deserve their privacy. Maybe he gave her his phone number. Or said he loved her. Or said she was a good person. Or thanked her. Or whispered, “Had we but world enough, and time...” and left her to look up the rest of it. SOFIA COPPOLA • FILM FESTIVAL
mor and can be funny, but it’s a bother. She has been married only a couple of years, but it’s clear that her husband thinks she’s in the way. Filled with his own importance, flattered that a starlet knows his name, he leaves her behind in the hotel room because—how does it go?—he’ll be working, and she won’t have a good time if she comes along with him. Ingmar Bergman’s “Scenes from a Marriage” was about a couple who met years after their divorce and found themselves “in the middle of the night in a dark house somewhere in the world.” That’s how Bob and Charlotte seem to me. Most of the time nobody knows where they are, or cares, and their togetherness is all that keeps them both from being lost and alone. They go to karaoke bars and drug parties, pachinko parlors and, again and again, the hotel bar. They wander Tokyo, an alien metropolis to which they lack the key. They don’t talk in the long literate sentences of the characters in “Before Sunrise,” but in the weary understatements of those who don’t have the answers. Now from all I’ve said you wouldn’t guess the movie is also a comedy, but it is. Basically it’s a comedy of manners—Japan’s, and ours. Bob Harris goes everywhere surrounded by a cloud of whitegloved women who bow and thank him for allowing himself to be thanked, I guess. Then there’s the director of the whiskey commercial, whose movements for some reason reminded me of Cab Calloway performing “Minnie the Moocher.” And the hooker sent up to Bob’s room, whose approach is melodramatic and archaic; she has obviously not
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Marie Antoinette Director: Sofia Coppola Writers: Sofia Coppola Stars: Kirsten Dunst, Jason Schwartzman, Rip Torn Release Date: 20 October 2006
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Based on the recent Marie-Antoinette biography by Antonia Fraser, Sofia Coppola’s film focuses on the personal qualities of the character of Marie-Antoinette and thus participates in the character’s historical rehabilitation. Antoinette is seen as a respectful loyal daughter, a loving mother, a patient wife, who had to withstand a flood of vindictive criticism since the moment she set foot in the French court. This depiction contrasts strongly with many prior representations of the character in film (“The Affair of the Necklace” for example), which show her as superficial, selfish and vain. The visuals and auditory elements, which evoke a powerful image of 18th-century Versailles, are the movie’s forte. And their effects linger in one’s mind (or at least they did in mine) long after one’s exit from the theater. As a budding art historian, I was stunned by the intensely lush visual spectacle the film has to offer: the pomp and circumstance of ritualized and regimented 18th-century Versailles. The semi-private world that Antoinette builds for herself to escape Versailles’s codified, quasi-totalitarian atmosphere, is evoked through a sequence of fast-moving images of champagne-guzzling, beautifully-decorated cake-eating, and Manolo Blahnik shoe buying. Thus Antoinette’s fantasy world is likened to a world recognizable to you, me and Carrie Bradshaw. Some people may scoff at this 21st century world transposed to an earlier time. But as the center of the world in 18th-century Europe, Marie-Antoinette’s “secret Versailles” would certainly have been as “hip” as this, and Coppola has found
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court society that causes her escape into a world of idle futility and libertinage. Her escape into the world of “playing shepherdess” in her pleasure-house of Le Hameau is shown not as a silly escape from responsibility but as the simple human need to be surrounded by the natural world. This place appears to us as it does to Antoinette: as a refuge from the backbiting, totalitarian regime of Versailles. Even the legendary “let them eat cake” statement allegedly made by Marie-Antoinette is discarded as fiction. There is almost no place in the film for the 18th-century reality as it existed outside the bubble-like world of Versailles. This is not the movie’s purpose. The end of the film is a bit abrupt: the last image shows the royal family heading to Paris to be imprisoned in the building of the Conciergerie. There is no mention of the guillotine anywhere, which again can seem surprising, but which shows that Coppola deliberately tried to eschew stereotypes and do something different. And it is all to her credit. SOFIA COPPOLA • FILM FESTIVAL
effective means through sound and image by which to make this hipness accessible. The story zooms in on the character of Marie-Antoinette, played by a ravishing Kirsten Dunst, who arrives at Versailles at the tender age of 14, to become queen of France a mere 5 years later. Coppola emphasizes the loneliness of Antoinette throughout the film: most important is her alienation from the French court by the fact that she is a foreigner (something that made her a scapegoat for all of France’s problems during the 1780’s). Her powerlessness to “fit in” is emphasized also through her sexual alienation from her socially-awkward husband (played by Jason Schwartzmann), her mother’s chidings that she has not yet produced an heir to the French throne (and thereby has not secured Austria’s political place in Europe), and the bitchy gossip that goes on behind her back at court. Marie-Antoinette is depicted as an intensely personable, friendly and playful person. Coppola fashions a Marie-Antoinette who is a dutiful daughter, a patient wife to Louis (who eventually overcomes his shyness and becomes a loving and protective husband and father), and a caring and tender mother. She is shown as both bold and humble, two qualities which had quasi-miraculous effects on both the court and the angry mob, as is shown in some of the film’s most touching moments. Equipped with these “essential” personal qualities, the charges traditionally made against Marie-Antoinette fade completely. It is precisely Antoinette’s ill-fated attempt at fitting into French
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Somewhere Director: Sofia Coppola Writers: Sofia Coppola Stars: Stephen Dorff, Elle Fanning, Chris Pontius Release Date: 21 January 2011
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Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff) sits in a suite of the Chateau Marmont, that little hotel for generations of Hollywood hideouts, and finds himself a hollow man. He is a movie star. With that comes such options as money, fame, sex, drugs. Fame is a joke because he gets nothing from it. Sex involves mechanical manipulations of the genitals. He drinks and takes drugs and gets a little wound up but pleasure doesn’t seem to be involved. On two occasions, he hires twin blond strippers to come to his room, set up their port able equipment and do choreographed pole dances. No sex is involved. He is demonstrating the truth that if you stare long enough at a wall, it will break the monotony if blond twins do pole dances in front of it. Sofia Coppola’s film “Somewhere” involves, as did her “Lost in Translation” (2003), a man separated from his family and sitting alone in a hotel room. Its opening resembles Vincent Gallo’s “The Brown Bunny” (2003): a long shot of a vehicle tearing around a track. A man racing madly to nowhere. In “Lost in Translation,” Bill Murray’s Bob makes dutiful but cheerless phone calls home from Japan. Dorff’s Johnny spends dutiful time with his 11-yearold daughter Cleo (Elle Fanning). Neither seems meaningfully connected. Because so much of “Somewhere” is set at the Chateau Marmont, it might be useful to discuss it. It isn’t cheap, but nobody goes there to indulge in conspicuous consumption. What it offers above all is a management that minds its own business. What happens at the Chateau Marmont stays at the Chateau Marmont. It’s often linked with another
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He believes he’s nothing, and it appears he’s correct. This is called depression, but it may simply be a realistic view of the situation. sons he got this way. It is not a diagnosis, still less a prescription. Johnny stares at the wall and the film stares back. This is more interesting than it may sound. Coppola watches this world. The familiar strangers on the hotel staff are on a first-name basis because a star’s world has become reduced to his support. Hookers and sex partners come and go. There are parties filled with strangers, most of them not excited to see a star because they see stars constantly. Then his daughter. What led to the divorce Cleo probably knows better than he does. The child of an actor, she has learned to play a star. She observes his drinking, his detached attempts at fatherhood, the woman he makes no attempt to explain at breakfast. Why does a man like this inflict partial custody on a blameless child? Coppola is a fascinating director. She sees, and we see exactly what she sees. There is little attempt here to observe a plot. All the attention is on the handful of characters, on Johnny. He has attained success in his chosen field, and lost track of the ability to experience it. Perhaps you can stimulate yourself so much for so long that your sensitivity wears out. If Johnny has no inner life and his outer life no longer matters, then he’s right: He’s nothing.
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semiresidential legend a few blocks away, the Sunset Marquis. The Chateau, I sense, is more useful for clients who want not so much privacy as retreat. There’s a scene where Johnny nods to Benicio Del Toro in the elevator. I’ll bet you del Toro was actually staying there at the time. They are both simply waiting for their floors. The notion of a star sinking into seclusion and depression isn’t new. Gus Van Sant’s “Last Days” (2005) starred Michael Pitt as a character unmistakably inspired by Kurt Cobain. What distinguishes Coppola’s film is the detail in her portrait of celebrity life. Remember that she was a little girl and later a young actress on the sets of her father’s movies. Now that we see how observant she is, we can only speculate about what she understood right from the start. She played Michael Corleone’s baby. “Somewhere,” which won the Golden Lion at the 2010 Venice Film Festival, has, for example, an unusually accurate portrait of how publicists work from the client’s point of view. Some become friends, some remain employees, but during work, they function as parents and guardians. The star’s contract requires him to do some press. The phone rings, and the publicist tells the star where to go and what to do. He takes on a certain passivity. The car is there, he takes the car. The press is there, he talks to the press. Some stars are more interested and interesting. Not Johnny. He flies to Milan to accept an award, and the event plays like a bus ride with a jacuzzi. He seems to suffer from anhedonia, the inability to feel pleasure. Perhaps he hardly feels anything. The film only indirectly suggests some of the rea-
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Reference http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0422720/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1421051/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0159097/?ref_=nm_knf_i3 http://www.imdb.com/title/ tt0335266/?ref_=nm_knf_i2 http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/somewhere-2010 http://www.focusfeatures.com/somewhere https://thedissolve.com/features/movie-of-the-week/1079-in-sofia-coppolas-films-music-sayswhat-characters/ http://www.rogerebert.com/cast-and-crew/sofia-coppola https://www.dga.org/Craft/DGAQ/ All-Articles/1302-Spring-2013/Sofia-Coppola.aspx http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-virgin-suicides-2000 http://www.festival-cannes.com/en/theDailyArticle/61113.html http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/06/09/brian-reitzell-exclusive-stream-auto-music-sofia-coppola/?_r=0 http://www.rookiemag.com/2013/06/sofia-coppola-interview/2/ http://www.moma.org/rails4/calendar/film/1502 SOFIA COPPOLA • FILM FESTIVAL