That's because while in that post, I was spiritually communing with Scarlett Johansson's character from Lost in Translation, but in this post, I am in touch with what the actual ScarJo is doing these days.
And that is ... directing movies?
I don't know why I should be surprised by that. Her instincts as an actor show she has an understanding of storytelling through film, so the next logical step would be directing.
Eleanor the Great, which was the first of two movies I watched on the plane back from Tokyo (My Dead Friend Zoe does not get its own post), is actually Johansson's third effort as a director. The first two are quite different: something called American Express Unstaged: Ellie Goulding in 2015, and a 2009 short called These Vagabond Shoes.
Eleanor the Great is also different, in that it's different from what we might expect Johansson might direct, if we had any preconceived notions of that. We might assume she'd follow in the footsteps of a director who had brought her one of her more iconic roles, maybe even make a Sofia Coppola-type film if Lost in Translation still felt like a defining text for her all these years later.
Instead, she's following in the footsteps of another actor-turned-director, Sarah Polley.
Polley's Away From Her was what came to mind for me as I watched Eleanor the Great. Both films were made by young actresses about elderly women, and both surprised with that choice because it would not seem to be any outgrowth of their own lived experience. I guess the difference is that Polley was really young when she made Away From Her, only 27, while ScarJo has now crossed (gasp!) into her forties, only just. (She's 41.)
Indeed the general subject matter is not the only surprising thing about Eleanor the Great, the June Squibb-led film that deals with a 94-year-old woman who has just lost her best friend, with whom she'd been living for more than a decade. (Squibb is actually two years older than that, now 96, though the movie did come out last year.) It's the specific deception Eleanor gets involved in that's quite the controversial matter, though I won't tell you what that is -- it would be a bit like telling you the central controversy of The Drama, and just about as controversial.
In any case, I'm pleased to say that Johansson proves herself quite capable on this side of the camera, though not to the level Polley achieved with Away From Her. This is a more mainstream, conventional movie, even with the controversial topic I'm not talking about now.
So yes I'm back now, and was pretty useless the first few days, as that cold I told you about in my last post didn't get any better. I can tell you it was a lot of fun rolling my bags through multiple airports, stopping every minute or so to sneeze or blow my nose, and just hoping that no busybody airport worker would see me and ask me if I should really be flying. (My cover story for having a runny nose and watery eyes was that I was emotional over saying farewell to a loved one.) I didn't get stopped, but that didn't make the redeye from Tokyo to Brisbane, and then another flight to Melbourne, any less miserable.
