It's the old distraction one-two, known in Hollywood as sexposition: if you've got a boring dialogue sequence – two cops yakking about a case, maybe – stick it in a strip club, where the sight of cavorting female flesh will cover up your thimble-brained story's deficiencies. Pole-dancing on screen is also becoming bit of a rite of passage for your classy, upscale actress (see Natalie Portman in Closer). But quite why film director-cum-fashionista Sofia Coppola should be so fascinated – even obsessed – is less clear.
Whatever it is about pole-dancing, Coppola just can't stop filming it. One of the big selling points – almost the only selling point – of her new film The Bling Ring is a scene where Emma Watson swings handily around the upright (see the trailer for a brief glimpse). In her last film, Somewhere, the Playboy-bothering Shannon twins engage in some hotel-room pole-dance action for ennui-dogged star Stephen Dorff. The celebrated music video she made for The White Stripes's cover of I Just Don't Know What To Do With Myself consisted entirely of Kate Moss in her scants doing her approximation of the Nigel Farage shuffle. A key scene in her early hit Lost in Translation features Bill Murray sitting morosely in the corner of a Japanese lapdancing club while Peaches' gruesome Fuck the Pain Away bellows out of the PA.
Now, Coppola isn't some raddled old hack with humiliation issues; she's a major-league film-maker with an Oscar and a Golden Lion tucked under her belt. There must, surely, be a point to all this. I suspect that it has something to do with alienation and disconnect: it is a thematic thread that runs through all her work. Dorff falls asleep as the Playboy twins do their damnedest to keep him interested; Murray and Scarlett Johansson are jaded as hell, numbed by frenetic socialising, and seek escape; Watson, we must assume, is essaying the affect-free thrillseeking of the try-anything contemporary Angeleno. (Moss, presumably, just didn't know what to do with herself.)
Surely, though, it's time for Coppola to turn the tables and move the motif along a little bit. For her next trick, she should get a man to rotate and gyrate. Who would do it? I would put even money on Robert Downey Jr.
