Exploring Sofia Coppola’s place in cinema legacy
Born in 1971 to cinematic legend Francis Ford Coppola and fellow filmmaker and artist Eleanor Coppola, Sofia Coppola never had to worry about getting her foot in the film industry. Beginning her career as an actor in her father’s movies, it was Sofia Coppola’s performance in The Godfather Part III as Mary Corleone that really put her name on the map, albeit, with much criticism. Coppola earned two Razzies for the role, including Worst Supporting Actress, and some critics even suggested that her terrible performance in the film led to its box office decline. However, Coppola was not disheartened by her negative reception, stating that she didn’t intend to become an actress, she just wanted to help her father out.
Instead, inspired by her parents, Coppola pursued filmmaking, proving herself to be a lot more capable behind the camera. Her first short film, Lick The Star, filmed in black-and-white on 16mm, explores themes that have permeated Coppola’s entire filmography since then: girlhood, isolation, and melancholy. The film opens with what has come to be one of Coppola’s trademark shots: a girl pensively looking out of the window of a moving car. The 14-minute short depicts a group of girls that devise a plan to poison the boys in their school after reading Flowers in the Attic, using the codename ‘Lick the Star’.
Coppola’s next film, and debut feature, The Virgin Suicides, seemed like a natural progression from Lick The Star. Based on the novel of the same name by Jeffrey Eugenides, the incredible film follows the Lisbon sisters, narrated by the local neighbourhood boys who are enthralled by the girls, whose conservative parents gradually get stricter, eventually confining them to their house. The film is beautiful and tragic, depicting girlhood with a complexity and depth that most films, up until that point, did not. The movie expands on the themes and cinematographic techniques that Lick The Star explored, however, The Virgin Suicides is fully fleshed out, complete with a stunning score by French duo Air and exquisite cinematography by Edward Lachman.
Coppola’s debut was met with generally positive reviews, however, the past decade has welcomed its resurgence thanks to apps such as Tumblr, YouTube, and TikTok providing a platform for new generations of teenage girls to fall in love with the film all over again. From its themes of misunderstood girlhood and isolation to the dreamy and overtly feminine visuals, there is a lot for young girls to resonate with The Virgin Suicides. However, because of the film’s appeal to youth, with its unashamed femininity reflected in the pastel colour palette, floral dresses, and kitsch trinkets scattering the girl’s bedroom floors, many critics, especially male, overlooked Coppola’s work as girly and shallow, nothing more than a series of pretty images.
This view has been held by many critics throughout the majority of Coppola’s career, especially after the release of 2006’s Marie Antoinette, which was full to the brim with extravagant fashion, pretty cakes, angelic garden frolicking, and decadence. These critics have largely failed to find substance in Coppola’s cinema, equating femininity with ‘fluffiness’ and a lack of substance, with one reviewer even labelling Marie Antoinette as “only for girls and gays”. In defence of Coppola, Anna Backman Rogers states that “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”.
The gendered language that is used to criticise Coppola signifies Hollywood’s issue with female filmmakers, seeing them as potential threats to the destabilisation of the dominant masculine mode of cinema that perpetuates the ideals essential to a patriarchal society. Coppola’s frilly and soft-coloured set and costume designs may be central to her filmic aesthetics, but this does not negate the ability for her films to be complex. The Virgin Suicides explores the suicide of one of the Lisbon sisters, shown floating in a pool of bloody bathwater, drawing resemblance to Hamlet’s Ophelia, clutching a prayer card. A shot of the bathroom windowsill shows copious amounts of beauty products, the sill lined with little stickers. The year that follows Cecilia’s suicide marks a period of destructive behaviour, isolation, and repression, eventually resulting in tragedy. Coppola showcases the pressures of being a young girl, with Cecilia sitting in her hospital bed saying one poignant line that seems to speak to the male critics that just don’t get Coppola’s work: “Obviously doctor, you’ve never been a 13-year-old girl”.
Coppola’s debut is brutal yet beautiful, and her follow up, the now-iconic picture Lost in Translation, only generated further praise, even winning an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. Starring Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson, the film used a small crew and minimal equipment, yet turned out to be a massive success. Even today, Lost in Translation is widely considered Coppola’s greatest film, exploring isolation with perfect mastery. The shoegaze and dream pop-infused score, featuring the likes of My Bloody Valentine and The Jesus and Mary Chain tie the whole film together, creating an introspective and moving masterpiece.
However, for every brilliant Sofia Coppola movie, there is one distinctively less so. Films like The Bling Ring, Somewhere, and The Beguiled rarely meet the mark in comparison to her much more refined, earlier works. All of Coppola’s films take place at a moment of fracture. A moment where things start to turn sour, usually against a backdrop of detriment in wider society. For example, Marie Antoinette is set during the French Revolution, and The Beguiled takes place in the midst of the American Civil War. But all of her films have one thing in common: they centre on wealthy, white, pretty women. It seems Coppola heard the phrase “write what you know” and took it all too literally.
The Beguiled, starring frequent Coppola collaborator Kirsten Dunst, alongside Elle Fanning, Nicole Kidman, and Colin Farrell, centres around a group of women that discover a wounded soldier, thus taking him in to tend to his injuries. The film highlights one of Coppola’s biggest issues, erasing history in a way that is both disappointing and damaging. Based on a novel by Thomas P. Cullinan, the original source material contains both a black character – an enslaved person, and a mixed race character, yet both are absent from Coppola’s adaptation. She defended her removal of the black slave character by stating that “this was not the depiction of an African American character” that she wanted to portray to her audience. This can be looked at in multiple ways. Coppola’s erasure of black characters from an important part of history signifies Coppola’s inability to adequately write black characters. However, at the same time, many black women have agreed that Coppola should stay away from writing black characters anyway, especially those surrounding an enslaved person, as it is clear that the director would not be able to adequately depict this. Regardless of the debate surrounding the absence of black women in The Beguiled, something inherently problematic in all of Coppola’s films is that black women – or even men – don’t seem to exist at all. Coppola’s worlds are as white as can be, excluding black women from her model of femininity that is dainty and waifish, whether that’s in 1970s Michigan or 2010s California.
Her status as the daughter of one of cinema’s most famous filmmakers has led to accusations of nepotism, which is undeniable. Yet, she has proved herself to be capable of creating some astounding films that will be loved for a long time, there’s no doubt about that. Coppola’s downfall comes in her lack of diversity; her films, despite their merits, project the voices of wealthy white women, the kind of woman that is given considerably more privilege than any other. The problem lies deep within Hollywood, hesitant of opening its doors to anyone that is not a straight, white filmmaker that might potentially disturb the cultural hegemony of the ruling class and may be capable of making films that showcase positive representations of non-white and non-heterosexual girlhood. With that being said, Coppola’s lack of ability to represent minority characters, let alone give them a leading role, is inevitably her biggest flaw and highlights the need for her to unlearn much of her privilege and become more conscious of the way her characters operate on screen.
Coppola’s filmmaking career has garnered both intense criticism and glorious praise, yet what is undeniable is that Coppola knows what she wants to create, and succeeds in doing so. Her eye for style, finding its root in modelling and fashion design earlier in her career, (alongside her friend Stephanie Hayman and Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon, Coppola co-founded the clothing line Milk Fed) greatly influenced the intricacies of her film’s aesthetics. Her visual style is recognisable, alongside her constant exploration of certain themes, making her an auteur. Yet, many critics are still hesitant to call her one. Why? Because she’s a woman that unabashedly centres feminine identity in her work, with heavily stylised visuals to match.
If we are to look at her films for what they are: mediations on the lives of young, misunderstood (albeit white and straight) teenage girls, Coppola is undeniably the master of her craft. She takes young girls seriously, whose troubles are so often brushed off as melodramatic or exaggerated. Her dedication to visual style is, at least in her most successful works, matched with equal dedication to complex characterisation. Although Coppola has her fair share of flaws and failures, (it is hard to believe that the same person made Lost in Translation and The Bling Ring…) the director is still in every sense of the word an auteur and marks an important hallmark in cinema, finally coming to privilege the voices of teenage girls with understanding and empathy, which was largely absent before the 1990s. Coppola has undoubtedly inspired a legion of female filmmakers since her debut The Virgin Suicides, thus making her an essential part of film history to acknowledge and appreciate.
