This must be the place (2011)

Sorrentino again! In This Must be the Place, Sean Penn plays an ageing rock musician (who talks with a lisp, and wears granny glasses), Cheyenne, who initially seems to sleepwalk through his Dubliner life. I couldn't stop thinking of him as a kind of Robert Smith-copy; a person a bit out of step with the present. In the film, Cheyenne undergoes some form of inner change, but it is up to the viewer to decide what change this really is. It is interesting that even though Sorrentino paints with broad streaks (big hallucinatory moment, deadpan jokes, breathtaking locations) he hardly ever drums a specific idea into the viewer's mind. To me, this is a virtue, even though some segments of the film become too disparate and open-ended. The part that deals with Cheyenne's attempt to find the Nazi who tormented his father did not work very well, in my opinion.

What we have here is the familiar story about an alienated rock star, but this picture is drawn into its most surreal corner and the film never dwells on celebrity. In the beginning of the film, he lives in a mansion, spending his days on frozen pizza dinners or contemplating whether he should sell his tesco shares. He hangs out with a teenage fan and also her mother (or that's who I think this woman is). His relationship with his wife is uncomplicated. The death of his father brings him to the US, and the film takes a different turn. Some reviewers have mentioned about Wim Wenders, and yes, as Cheyenne travels to America Wenders' colorful landscapes clearly haunt the film. There is even a blunt reference to Wenders through the appearance of Harry Dean Stanton (yeah!) as a man obsessed with his invention of a suitcase with wheels. But what the film - thankfully - lacks is Wenders' sentimentality. In one of the film's stand-out scenes, Cheyenne has ended up in the home of a young widowed woman and her child. The child puts a guitar on Cheyenne's lap and tells him about this Arcade fire song. No, it's Talking heads, Cheyenne insists. The man plays a quiet guitar melody and the boy sings. It was a heart-warming, gentle moment which had nothing to do with calculation (I think). Byrne himself appears in the film - in a most wonderful way.  

Both here and in Il divo, Sorrentino never lets go of the human as embodied. He has a better sense of small bodily quirks than almost any other contemporary director. I think this is what makes his characters interesting - that they are full-blown beings (their history and so on seem to have only a secondary interest for Sorrentino, and maybe this is why the Nazi hunt part of the film is a bit out of place). For this reason, the contrast between Cheyenne, who is presented as a stranger to/in the world, and his wife Jane, is quite stunning to watch.

This Must be the Place is the kind of film that I wanted to watch again as the end credits were rolling. It's a beautiul film with plenty of funny details.