Week 12: The Film Auteur

This week I watched three movies by Sofia Coppola. The movies were, The Virgin Suicides, Somewhere, and Lost in Translation. I found her style of directing interesting, but I didn't actually really like the movies I watched.

One of the biggest similarities I saw in her movies was that she has a lot of shots that are very long of people doing mundane things. For example in Lost in Translation there is a shot of the two main characters riding the elevator  with a bunch of other people and instead of seeing them enter and cutting to the next scene you watch them ride all the way in silence. Anther example of this is in Somewhere when the main character is getting his face molded for a part in a film. They cover his whole face with some sort of white clay substance and then we sit and watch him just breathing from his nose for much longer then you'd expect to see.  I thought this style of filming created an awkward tension that was actually boring to watch after a while. It made the flow of the films seem to move very slowly.

Another similarity was that the character in the three movies I watched all had rather rough lives. They struggled with something, which I think is very realistic. They weren't fairy tale love stories that ended happy and had characters with happy lives. They were rough and raw and sometimes ended uneventfully. In The Virgin Suicides all of these girls are trapped in their house under the rules of their extremely strict parents. This leads to all the girls committing suicide and making poor life decisions. In Somewhere, Johnny is an actor who lives a sad life that mostly consists of drinking and partying and watching poll dancers in his room. The only happy part of his life really is his daughter who gets left with him when her mom decides to leave. He bonds with his daughter, but still participates in his movie star life of having sex with beautiful women and traveling around. In Lost in Translation these two characters, Charlotte and Bob, are both struggling with in their marriages and having trouble fitting in in Japan. They form a strong bond and spend a lot of time together, but are separated at the end when Bob goes home to his family.

I noticed that Sofia Coppola has two movies with Kristen Dunst in it and in the rest of her movies there was at least one well-known actor. I think it is interesting that she makes these what I think are more quite, real to life films and gets big name actors to be in them. I think this was a very interesting assignment and I'm actually glad that I took the time to watch these three films. Although I didn't like these particular films very much it was interesting to watch multiple works by a director and start to see the similarities in their films.