Coppola: Palo Alto (2013)

Palo Alto is an adaptation of James Franco’s short story collection of the same name, honing in on two stories in particular while retaining the woozy, romantic feeling of the overall collection. The first story is in some ways the main story, revolving around a disenchanted senior (Emma Roberts) who develops a crush on her soccer coach (Franco), while the second story forms more of an ambient backdrop, revolving around the relationship between two stoners (Jack Kilmer and Nat Wolff) who stumble from one self-destructive, apathetic communion to another. Even the first story, though, feels somewhat dispersed, as if Gia Coppola were more interested in adapting the general feel of Franco’s collection, the loose, spontaneous breathlessness peculiar to a semi-connected sequence of short stories, resulting in something like an ensemble drama without an ensemble cast, a vividly adolescent prescience that the centre of things is always somewhere just out of reach or just offscreen, along with all the inchoate yearning that entails. At its strongest, the film yearns to transcend itself, as Coppola returns time and again to the luminescent low-tide of the party, when people are starting to pair off and make their separate ways – moments when the future seems tantalisingly close, whether it’s in the arms or bed of someone you’ve just met, or the empty streets that stretch away outside. As might be expected, that’s quite a delicate register to maintain – even if you are a Coppola – and it does, at times, start to feel a bit more like a fan party curated by Franco for himself, not that dissimilar to the opening scenes of This Is The End. Yet that narcissism is also, in some ways, what makes the film feel so true to adolescence – and possibly the film in which Franco has manage to craft his narcissism into an aesthetic accomplishment in the fullest and most resonant way. Of course, there is something immediately and somewhat repulsively narcissistic about the fantasy on display here – the hot yet self-deprecating coach who can’t manage to land a date but is pored over by his students – that doesn’t feel all that surprising to anyone who’s read or seen Franco’s other auteurist efforts. But the film goes beyond that, moving from narcissism to something like solipsism, insofar as it feels like Franco is just as keen to present himself as Roberts’ character – the sensitive, tortured, misunderstood girl – as he is the coach, in the same way that the original short story collection was partly inspired by a vast number of actual testimonies from Palo Alto adolescents that Franco made over in his own image. The result is a profoundly autoerotic romance – which is to say a poignantly and painfully adolescent romance – that may make every character in the film feel like an emanation of Franco’s beauty, but also clouds that beauty with a loneliness that’s quite unselfconscious, and almost unconscious, a strange and lingering insight into one of the most self-conscious self-promoters in Hollywood today.