Strangers in the afternoon

The woman is here because her cousin is in hospital, comatose, slowly dying, with no one to stay by her side, hold vigil. The cousins knew each other as kids, barely know each other as adults. But there’s no one else. The man is here because he’s always here, not at the hospital, but at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, where he works as a guard, a tranquil sentinel holding vigil over centuries of art. The woman visits the museum and, later, the man will accompany her to the hospital—this is the story of a friendship. Were that it had some deeply sinister edge, Museum Hours would resemble some unsettling fiction by Marguerite Duras, or perhaps Julio Cortázar. But writer/director Jem Cohen takes a very different sort of risk, resisting the pull of drama so as to let the connection between these two not-young characters, between their disparate experiences of art and life, blossom in it’s own good time. Film is an audiovisual medium, but some films are more about seeing and hearing than others. This one is exquisitely attentive to both.

Hearing: for several scenes I kept hearing Anne’s voice and thinking, my god, she sounds like Catherine O’Hara. Later on Anne sings to her comatose cousin in the penumbra and it finally dawned on me: she sounds like Catherine O’Hara because she’s Mary Margaret O’Hara, the wonderful, legendary Toronto singer, sister to the beloved Toronto-born comedienne, whose face I’d never have recognized, having only seen her once before, when she made a surprise appearance at a Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy show I attended some years back. Cohen often collaborates with musicians and O’Hara is a truly inspired choice for his co-protagonist, with her warm yet eccentric energy and that sense of something always hidden without seeming especially furtive or cultivating an air of mystery.

Johann, the guard, is portrayed by Bobby Sommer, who’s also spent his life surrounded by music, as a roadie in ’60s London and a concert promoter and tour manager in ’80s West Berlin. The exceedingly mild-mannered Johann shares stories of his rock ’n’ roll past with Anne that overlap in may regards with Sommer’s. The exchanges between Anne and Johann in the museum and hospital, in taverns or during a tour of the local grottoes, flow easily and naturally, a balm to ease the strangeness felt by the Canadian woman, visiting Vienna as a sort of designated mourner.

But Museum Hours, set in the mist-draped city where the study of art history originated, much of which unfolds at the Kunsthistorisches, much of which is given over to languorous gazes at Breughels and other paintings—not to mention at the varied visitors to the Kunsthistorisches, whose gazes are a fascinating subject on their own—is most obviously concerned with seeing. Yet Cohen doesn’t instruct us on how to regard art. He gives us space and time to do so in our own way, to look and wonder free of the burden of excessive contextualization. Both museum and hospital trade in silence, offer refuge, demand only patience. Between these spaces the characters, and we, enjoy spells of escape. The cumulative effect is could be regarded as a more somber Lost in Translation, yet that somberness is entirely earned, feels totally genuine, and leads to a quiet transcendence quit unlike anything the movies usually offer.

Somewhere: A time and space for us

One is characterized by decadence and girlhood, the other by austerity and manhood, but both are fun and dryly funny, both remarkably tender, and both orbit a system of privilege and unapologetically acknowledge the ennui can afflict its stars. Perhaps the important difference concerns the nature of these films’ central relationships. Between making Marie Antoinette and Somewhere Sofia Coppola had a child, and somewhere in the interim the latter became less about a male movie star whose soul has evaporated under the limelight than a father who attempts to breach the distance between he and his daughter with the utmost gentleness, as though the slightest hint of exertion might throw off the whole gambit. The hero of Somewhere almost never looks like he’s working hard, and neither does its director. That’s the charm of Coppola’s filmmaking, and it takes some kind of miserly grouch to dismiss her work for its buoyancy. Okay, miserly and impatient. Somewhere is a lovely, witty, touching film, but it’s not going anywhere fast.

It opens with Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff) driving his Ferrari in high-speed circles, a closed circuit that flatly summarizes the current course of his existence, drifting between parties, press junkets and award ceremonies. He’s driving on autopilot, as is most hilariously evident in a scene where he goes to bed with a stranger and falls asleep in her vagina. He breaks his arm in a party accident, and holes up at the Chateau Marmont, where he runs into Benicio Del Toro in the lift. More for consolation than arousal, we see Johnny hire a private pole-dancing performance from blonde twins preparing for their exam. Soon afterward we see Johnny watch 11-year-old Cleo (Elle Fanning) rehearse a figure skating routine, and while there’s a detectable similarity in Johnny’s response, a calm, paternal, indiscriminate sort of encouragement, we’re never meant to confuse Johnny’s affection for seducible young women with his quietly anxious adoration for his daughter. That would be a sleazier, easier film than the one Coppola’s crafted here. What follows is simple enough—Johnny, normally a strictly short-term parent, finding himself the guardian of a tween over an extended period—yet what happens under the surface of Johnny and Elle’s time together is anything but. As father and daughter hang out and travel together, mostly in familial harmony, emotional contracts are discreetly redrawn. Something changes for both characters, though these changes are only suggested by Coppola’s use of sequence, music, and image (her shooter is the great Harris Savides).

And, of course, by the actors. Dorff is brilliantly cast. If he were an A-list celebrity his tabloid status might have interfered with the Coppola’s focus on intimate relationships, with the film world residing always in the background. More importantly, Dorff’s smiles retain something of his co-star’s adolescent lightness, while in other scenes he exhibits the weight of his years through an exhausted slouch. His comic timing’s inspired. In a bit where he gets a text message that reads, Why are you such an asshole?, it’s Dorff’s utterly nonplussed response that constitutes the scene’s punchline. Fanning meanwhile is radiant and touchingly real, natural without any self-consciousness, the ideal product of an acting clan in that she bears none of the ingratiating qualities of many child actors yet seems completely at ease before the cameras. Her role inevitably prompts us to seek parallels between Cleo’s childhood and the director’s, but I suspect Francis Ford Coppola’s life was awfully messier and more fraught with business crises than Johnny’s. My feeling is that autobiography is the film’s seasoning, not its meat. Somewhere is finally very much in keeping with Coppola’s ongoing concerns, particularly those of Lost in Translation, with which it shares some similar turning points. But it’s also a step forward from that earlier film’s portrait of life as permanent transit. By the time we’ve reached the end of this entry into the cinema of dislocation, there’s the sense that perhaps Somewhere truly does find a place for us.