Somewhere:
Sofia Coppala's Historic Film
(6/19/2011) There is an unique historical component to Ms. Coppala's film: Never in the history of cinema has been found a shot where a male movie star goes to sleep while performing cunninglingus on an absolutely ravishing eighteen-something female. Not passes out from too many drugs--surely that might be found somewhere--but simply goes to sleep out of normal sleepy time beddy-bye sleepiness. (Let me quick to add this is handled very tastefully with not even a hint of pornography, as I'm sure you can imagine if you're familiar with Ms. Coppala's work.) But, still, it must be admitted that he does go to sleep with his head in her muff.
Historical.
Something else unique happens in this film. The oxygen of lust is slowly sucked out of the film until it dies. This movie is about the other side of desire, the other side of lust. Imagine when lust has been satiated so often and so effectively and so completely that the expectation of future lust simply loses its ability to arouse.
What remains is the subject of this film. Like walking on the beach in Saint-Tropez surrounded by a cornupopia of naked beautiful people and not a sign of tumescence in sight. Lust overridden by surfeit: outside the exit door of selfishness.
Who better than Sofia Coppala to show us what is on the other side of that door?
Born into a level of affluence, of artistic nobility, of world stardom hardly imaginable, it makes perfect sense that if she really paid attention, she would realize that her heritage gave her an insight into a reality hidden to the rest of us, an insight that was a unique gift her art would be obligated to reveal.
So she revealed it. What it looks like to live in the most rarified atmosphere on earth, the atmosphere where every need is supplied without thought and where literally every wish, every desire, every impulse receives instant gratification.
In such a world there are no biggies. Your Ferrari stops running, no biggy. Your ex-wife dumps your 11 year old daughter on you in the midst of your publicity run for your new movie, no biggie. Your daughter is sad that her parents don't seem to want to be around her, no biggie.
But Ms. Coppala tells us that there is a biggy nonetheless. She sees that the surfeit of selfishness becomes not an end in itself but an unsustainable reality in an age when sustainability is the bedrock upon which all ethical constructs of right and wrong must be erected.
What to do in such a world?
I'll tell you this much about the ending: the hero who prefers sleep to cunninglingus-with-the-goddess doesn't blow his brains out. That would be too real and Biblically sound...and unsustainable.
Neal