There's a leitmotif about sexuality (among other things) running through Sofia Coppola's new film Somewhere that's both mordantly funny and a bit disquieting; a little sinister even. As you know if you've seen the film, or even read about it, Somewhere's storyline, such as it is, concerns one Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff), a dissolute aging Hollywood golden boy holed up at the legendary haven of tinseltown decadence, sunset Boulevard's Chateau Marmont. Circumstances necessitate that he spend more time than he had been planning with his 11-year-old daughter from a prior relationship, an alert, talented, overtly cheerful girl named Cleo (Elle Fanning). The film largely alternates between scenes of Johnny half-heartedly fulfilling his professional duties and possibly even more half-heartedly playing bad boy, and showing the growth of his relationship to a family member he, as it happens, barely knows. Once Cleo takes up temporary residence with Johnny at the Chateau, the border between his two lives becomes peculiarly porous. It's one thing when, on a jaunt to Milan, a querulous sometime lover of Johnny's (Laura Chiatti) muscles in, in her pushy European way, to Johnny and Cleo's almost-cozy domestic arrangement; in that context, Cleo can overtly express her disapproval, and the communication between father and daughter beyond that grows practically conspiratorial. It's the more fleeting encounters that pack an almost haunting punch.
The thing is, it's not just that Johnny is an indiscriminate (if not exactly avid; one of the film's most trenchant bits involves what one might term Johnny's lack of presence in the midst of an erotic assignation) consumer of young female flesh. It is that the wearers of the young female flesh, all of them, as they used to say, free, white, and over 21, are almost constantly throwing that flesh at Johnny. He can't even look off the balcony in the middle of a phone call without seeing some ostensible hottie lolling or lounging. And when that ostensible hottie sees Johnny Marco and recognizes him, five will get you ten that she will offer herself to him. The one in the image above is played by Nicole Trunfio, and the image above shows her right before she pulls back her bikini top.When Johnny and Cleo return to the Chateau after their brief trip to Italy, they're seen, relatively bedraggled, dragging their bags back to their apartment in the hotel. Johnny then pops into his bedroom, where he's greeted by a young woman (Laura Ramsey) wearing nothing but a sailor's cap, sitting under the covers, waiting for him. "It's not a good time," he mutters. The woman sits up and leans forward, and while she's a thoroughly and undeniably attractive human being, here Harris Savides camera catches her form in a stance that could arguably called unflattering; she looks peculiarly exposed, let's say. "Are you sure?" she asks, and her smile, meant to allure, seems a little sickly. "Yeah," Johnny nods, and he backs out of the room and then takes Cleo downstairs for a meal.
All this isn't meant to make the viewer feel sorry for Johnny, or even really to think about him much at all, at least I don't believe that's the case. The character one thinks about is Cleo, who's rather coltishly poised at the threshold of adolescence. I've seen one fulminator on Twitter rage that the scene in which Elle Fanning's character figure skates in a leotard constitutes "child pornography" (yeah, I know; it's too late for me, but not for you—heed my words and just stay the hell away from Twitter), and while that's ridiculous, I believe that Coppola is not interested in soft-pedaling the fact that Cleo is in fact on the cusp of something. She's trying out a particular female role with her father throughout—that is, of domestic caretaker, an aspect of old-school wifeliness. The scene where she prepares Eggs Benedict for her dad and his genial rotter pal, the shot of her carefully cutting the chives to sprinkle atop the hollandaise sauce, indicate not just care and thoughtfulness but an indisputable impulse to please, to impress. The women who throw themselves at Johnny; they too want to please and impress. Not just Johnny, but the world, such as it is. As Johnny prepares to exit the Chateau, perhaps for good, we see one more half-naked girl (Katie Nehra) on a patio at the end of a hallway. She's not undressed for Johnny; she's being made up for a photo shoot, of the sort they do at the Chateau. By this time all of the naked and half-naked young women have gotten, frankly, to be a bit much (even the dirty old man inside me—and you don't have to dig very far to find him—was saying, "Okay, I think I've seen enough"), and I think that's entirely deliberate. But one can be struck by a nagging thought: that Cleo could, in not so very much time, grow up to be one of those women. Well, no, one might want to answer oneself. She's clearly too smart, too self-possessed. Well, as her penultimate scene with Johnny shows, she's not all that self possessed; she's kind of lost and lonely too, and she's eleven. And smart? What's that insurance against? Are we entirely sure that all the women showing Johnny their tits are dumb by default? And if Cleo does grow up to be one of those girls who likes to flash movie stars from their balconies, is that the end of the world?
Sofia Coppola is hardly a prig, as the opening shot of Lost in Translation quite eloquently testifies. And, as it happens, one can even find topless photos of the director herself—rather artistic ones, not Maximesque shots, natch—floating around on the web. But in Somewhere she demonstrates an interesting insistence on the issue of exposure and, if you'll excuse the phrasing, the solicitation of consensual relations, and brings up a lot of questions as a result. It's just one more indication that the film is quite probably a lot more than the pretty trifle that even some of its admirers—myself somewhat included—have tended to categorize it as.
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