Examining the aesthetic impact of Sofia Coppola’s movies
Although Sofia Coppola began her career as an occasional actor, she spent the majority of the 1990s working within the fashion industry, even harnessing her own brand, Milk Fed, and studying photography. Evidently, Coppola has an eye for visual style, which has become an intrinsic part of her work as a filmmaker.
From the moment she released her first short film, Lick the Star and its teenage protagonists filmed in hazy black-and-white images, Coppola’s preoccupation with aesthetics became overwhelmingly apparent. However, her directorial debut, The Virgin Suicides, epitomises Coppola’s signature visual style, spawning a dedicated and evergrowing fanbase over multiple decades.
The Virgin Suicides tells the tale of five sisters who become increasingly isolated from their peers as their strict parents prevent them from living typical adolescent lives. Under their parents’ tyrannous rule, the girls become despondent and depressed, resulting in inevitable tragedy. From the outside, the pretty, blonde Lisbon sisters appear to represent an American ideal, living in a quaint suburban home with their religious, conservative parents. Yet Coppola picks these ideals apart, depicting the girls’ cataclysmic downfall. Central to the film’s appeal is its rich visual style, defined by pastel colours, religious iconography, floral fabrics and overtly feminine clothing.
Hazy shots of the yellowy sun bleeding through the trees, underwear draped from crucifixes, and cosmetic-lined windowsills encapsulate the film’s distinctive atmosphere. There is always the sense that something terrible is brewing (after all – we know how the film will end based on its title). By lingering on static shots of the girls’ surroundings, Coppola allows this feeling to prevail, the overtly feminine sets and outfits contrasting with the impending, violent disaster.
Since the dark days of Tumblr to the current reign of Pinterest and TikTok, stills from The Virgin Suicides have flooded the internet, typically shared by accounts run by teenage girls and young women. The film has harnessed the ability to speak to teenage girls for several decades, who have found solace and respect in Coppola’s understanding of the difficulties of being a young girl. Until the release of the film, teenage girls had rarely been depicted in such a way on screen. As Coppola noted in an interview with Vogue, “You make things to connect with other people, and when I was young, stuff for teenagers was always condescending. I’m proud I got to make something about teens concerning serious topics where they were complex people and not just kids.”
The fact that Coppola’s film not only treats teenage girls with respect but also prioritises overtly girlish visuals – typically given less value by the patriarchally-dominated film industry – is quite extraordinary. Since the filmmaker released The Virgin Suicides, she has continued to release movies that deal with similar themes of isolation and femininity, such as Lost in Translation, Marie Antoinette and The Beguiled. Just like her debut, these films are also preoccupied with aesthetics, with the latter two featuring a particularly feminine visual palette.
Coppola’s uncompromisingly feminine style acts as a middle finger towards those that equate girliness with vapidness. Through complexly crafted characters, Coppola highlights the strife many young girls and women face. Yet, that hasn’t stopped many male critics from making misogyny-charged comments about Coppola’s films, somehow finding little substance within her movies because of their equal preoccupation with visuals.
In defence of Marie Antoinette, Anna Backman Rogers states (via Sofia Coppola: The Politics of Visual Pleasure), “The misogynist implication that is embarrassingly evident here is that Coppola’s ‘pretty’ and decorative mise-en-scene is taken to signify nothing beyond its pleasing surface, indeed her oeuvre is frequently likened to cinematic pastry, a delightful cream puff, full of delicious air but lacking in meaty (and masculine) substance.” Coppola’s work proves that movies can be pretty, feminine, and complex. Coppola’s criticisms over her career have been unfairly wagered compared to her similarly visually-driven contemporaries, such as Wes Anderson or Michel Gondry. Of course, the difference is that Coppola’s movies are overwhelmingly feminine in both their visual form and content.
However, Coppola’s legacy has inspired a generation of new filmmakers who have taken obvious inspiration from her work. From I Believe in Unicorns to Mustang, Coppola has left a traceable influence through her dedication to championing cinematic femininity. Even her niece Gia Coppola’s debut feature, Palo Alto, is highly indebted to movies such as The Virgin Suicides, taking significant inspiration from its visual style.
Images of Coppola’s work have become a mode of communication on the internet, often acting as a voiceless vessel for expressing female suffering, misunderstanding, and despair. Stills of Lux Lisbon laying motionless on the grass or Marie Antoinette crying have become shorthand for adolescent girls to communicate with others, both satirically and seriously. The phenomenon, finding popularity most prominently on TikTok, only highlights the enduring nature of Coppola’s films.
The filmmaker has certainly achieved her aim of creating movies that explore young women in a way they are rarely granted access to on-screen, creating a space where their struggles are given visibility. By carving out a uniquely feminine visual palette within her films, Coppola is able to connect with her audience on a greater level, pulling us into her characters’ worlds and assuring viewers that femininity is not frivolous.
