Rewatching Lost in Translation, it wouldn't have been at all suprising had my viewing been overlaid by an awareness of the way in which the nature and quality of Bob and Charlotte's experiences, interactions and inner lives in Tokyo (and Kyoto) precisely, metaphorically, profoundly reflects my own experience of the world and my place in it. But it's a mark of the film's quality that, while watching it, those kinds of thoughts weren't uppermost in my mind; instead, I was absorbed by the relationship between Bob and Charlotte themselves, and their experiences, alone and together, in the strange land where they find themselves and each other. Of course, there's a strong element of identification and recognition in my response to the film - but that element remains always just below the surface, or perhaps is glimpsed only in fleeting moments, a snatch of music, a blurry night city landscape, a still moment alone above everything.
I usually think of The Virgin Suicides as my favourite Sofia Coppola film, but Lost in Translation is probably her most perfect - the way in which it invokes the aloneness of the two main characters, and the sense of transience, quiet alienation and inevitable failures of understanding and communication which are always there but merely especially evident in a foreign country, and then sets that against the desire for connection and the unexpected, miraculous way in which we occasionally, briefly find it, is note perfect, as is its ending. (cf 1, 2)
What The Virgin Suicides does that Lost in Translation doesn't is that it really stirs me - it produces pangs that feel almost physical. It was five years between the first time I saw it and the second, and it's been another five to now, the third, and it feels like the way I've responded to it on each of those occasions has been basically the same: what I wrote about it after that second watching still rings true (...coming to hold collective memories of times we hadn't experienced...).
All of Coppola's films feel very personal (it's impossible to imagine someone making such perceptive, subtle films without themselves possessing the sensitivity that animates them), and it's tempting to see this one, her first, as the most personal of the four to date - but it's in the sensibility that she brings to it rather than in the details of the story or characters (after all, it's an adaptation - and a notably faithful one - of the Eugenides novel), and it's that sensibility that has so drawn me in the past, and still does, intensely, bittersweet, languid, melancholy, cryptic.
So, after The Virgin Suicides and Lost in Translation came Marie Antoinette, which I'd been keenly anticipating and wasn't at all disappointed by. I can count on the fingers of one hand the people who I know who like the film (and I've sure talked, and argued, about the film with a lot of people) - in fact, it would top out at two - but I think that most people just aren't wired in the way that you need to be for MA to pierce, as it does me.
Going by extemporanea, I'd seen Marie Antoinette those first two times on the big screen (the first time with KB, who did like it, and then a second time on my own) and not since, but I could swear there'd been another time, on dvd - perhaps I forgot to note it, whenever it was. In any event, to watch it again is to be reimmersed in its many pleasures - visual, musical, associative.
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This recent round of rewatching was, of course, inspired by Somewhere; Lost in Translation on Monday, The Virgin Suicides on Tuesday, Somewhere itself at the Nova, again with KB, on Thursday, and then Marie Antoinette tonight (Saturday).
And I liked Somewhere, a lot actually, though I wonder if I would've liked it as much had it been directed by someone else. It looks and feels very much like an independent film (in the American sense) - a reminder that, for all of her ubiquity and ability to score A-list Hollywood actors for her films, Coppola is fundamentally an arthouse director - and it has the slowness and contemplative air of the genre. Not much happens, but what does happen (or fails to happen) is closely observed.
The film's vision of the hedonism and excess of Hollywood life is rendered in dull colours and shades - a striking contrast to Marie Antoinette's sparkling, brightly-lit court of Versailles (in Coppola's rendition, an antecedent of modern Hollywood) - and that artistic choice fits with the gentleness of the film's tone and approach. While Somewhere is squarely concerned with the hollowness of the Hollywood lifestyle, it's content to observe, highlighting the culture's many absurdities (the deadpan shooting of the pole dancing scenes and Johnny's reactions, for example, is hilarious) and contrasting the warmth of Johnny's relationship with Cleo and Cleo's own good nature and level-headedness, rather than taking a more overtly satirical or cutting approach to its subject.
It's a quiet film, but nonetheless satisfying. There are some small epiphanies - Cleo in the car, Johnny breaking down on the phone at night afterwards, the final scene - all of which add something, though I would've preferred it had the film ended (as I'd thought it was going to) with the slow zoom-out long shot of Johnny and Cleo sunbathing side by side on deck chairs; for me, it didn't need that final scene with Johnny getting out of his car and walking into the future, though perhaps I'll feel differently next time I watch it.
There are things that set Somewhere apart from Coppola's previous films, most notably its slowness and the sense of distance to it. The Virgin Suicides is overtly bathed in nostalgia and narrated through the distorting lens of memory and recollection, but in themselves those are immediate experiences and sensations, even if their subject is a past event. Lost in Translation takes a pair of adults in a foreign land, constrained by the roles that life has forced upon them, and takes us directly to the heart of their relationship in a way that's characterised by interiority and practically forces us to bring our own experiences and readings into how we understand their interactions. And Marie Antoinette makes a hyper-coloured dream of its 'historical' milieu and shows us what it is to be a bauble in such a glittering setting in the only way that it's possible to understand such a character - through flash and surfaces, and glimpses of the feelings and quiet desolation that lie below them.
But while the protagonists of those films are cryptic and, in at least some (and, really, probably in all) cases unknowable, in Somewhere, Johnny seems blank - he doesn't know who he is, and he doesn't have the inner resources (except, perhaps, until the very end) to change his circumstances. He has a role in his world that he plays, but he's utterly disconnected from other people and from any real understanding of himself. And the film dramatises (enacts) that distance, creating a detachment in how we observe Johnny and his world while at the same time drawing our attention to it. (The film's use of music is typical - while it often begins playing as if it's part of the film's 'soundtrack' and therefore separate from the events of the film itself, in all but one or two instances, Coppola is careful to show us that the music is in fact part of the film's narrative, playing from a stereo or a sound system somewhere.)
That said, Somewhere has much more in common with Coppola's other films than it is dissimilar. Like those other films, it avoids psychologisation of its characters; instead, the mysteriousness of people's inner lives (even to themselves) is highlighted, as are the spaces between people, and the failures to 'only connect' - with others, and with the world at large - which inevitably follow. And, while it's slowed down, it shares with Coppola's earlier films a certain dreamy sensibility which gives those thematic preoccupations a wistful, poetic colour.
* * *
Movies came up, as they often do, in a conversation with CStCW a few weeks ago, and I mentioned Godard, Wong Kar Wai and Sofia Coppola as three who I love. C wholly endorsed the first two, but balked at the third (and particularly Marie Antoinette) and was entirely puzzled by my liking of her; the conversation made me think about just what it is that I like about Coppola's films so much, because there's no doubt that they do resonate with me.
Godard (at least in his golden period) emphasises the disjointed and essentially constructed nature of experience, understanding and narrative in his riffs on cinema and artistic form, but with flashes of sentiment that emerge in the gaps (perhaps unwittingly, despite his best efforts) and defy any attempt to read or experience his films in a joyless, anti-humanist fashion; WKW has adopted the new wave ethos and married it to a giddy romanticism, all ecstatic expressionistic stylised swoons which defy the alienation that is so often the defining aspect of his characters' experiences; and then there's Coppola, about whom I've already written a mini-essay above.
Each has a distinctive cinematic idiom through which form and content are matched and expressed; for me, what all three have in common for me is that they make films that are essentially cinematic renditions of the way that I see and experience the world, rendered in a heightened, poetic fashion - Godard's take is more cerebral and WKW's more emotive, but Coppola's is the most immediate and the most piercing, the closest to a literal depiction of the world as it appears ('phenomenologically') to me. Coppola's films speak to me - I guess that's enough.
