Lana Del Rey’s favourite Sofia Coppola movie
Ever since Lana Del Rey started to gain popularity online, fans have been quick to draw parallels between the images of tragedy, glamour, obsession, and girlhood found in her music with specific films that seem to occupy a similar world.
With the help of image-based platforms like Tumblr and fan-made music videos uploaded to YouTube, titles ranging from American Beauty (specifically the image of Mena Suvari being showered in rose petals) to The Love Witch, Picnic at Hanging Rock, and more controversially, Lolita, came to form an unofficial watchlist for Del Rey fans.
Yet, if there’s any filmmaker associated with the singer more than anyone else, it’s Sofia Coppola, wherein, if you spend any time in the kinds of online spaces where Coppola’s films are championed, you’re probably in the presence of Lana Del Rey fans. It’s not hard to see why the two have long been connected, and we almost got a collaboration between them when the director asked Del Rey to pen some songs for her biopic Priscilla, the protagonist a long-time visual reference for the Elvis-loving singer, but the deadline was just too tight.
That would’ve been a dream come true for fans of both (the Venn diagram of that demographic would just be a big circle), but sadly it never came to fruition.
Both artists have explored the struggles of adolescent girls and women in their work, putting emphasis on the messy emotions that come with being young and unsure of your place in the world, where navigating relationships can be soul-crushing and incomprehensible.
There’s an innocence to a lot of the tracks Del Rey wrote back when she was known as Lizzy Grant, and this mixture of vulnerability, instability, and sensuality is apparent in songs like ‘Put Me in a Movie’, ‘Jump’, and ‘Afraid’, which feel spiritually aligned with characters like Marie Antoinette, Priscilla, and Lux Lisbon, who you can imagine listening to these songs (if any of them actually had access to some headphones, that is).
The latter, one of the sisters in The Virgin Suicides, spends the last few months of her short life engaging in promiscuous behaviour as she rebels against her repressive parents, and that image of her waking up in the light blue of the early morning on the football pitch, abandoned by Trip Fontaine after a night of sex, encapsulates the sadness at the bottom of it all, wherein her attempts to find fulfilment leave her feeling emptier than ever, a sentiment you could apply many songs to, particularly those from Ultraviolence.
It’s no surprise, then, to discover that one of Del Rey’s favourite movies by Coppola, according to Vogue Italia, is The Virgin Suicides, her 1999 directorial debut that balances a gorgeous palette of feminine colours and images with a harsh undercurrent of violence as the girls all commit suicide in the ultimate act of rebellion.
A song like ‘This Is What Makes Us Girls’ feels pretty Coppola-esque, and you can imagine if Lux had the chance, she’d be doing everything Del Rey describes in the song, which shows how deeply cinematic Del Rey’s work is, thereby making sense that she considers Coppola’s films as influences, particularly one as beautifully tragic as The Virgin Suicides, as she noted of herself, “I think of my songs as if they were films. Flashbacks, cuts, memories, with a monologue that’s running”.
