Sofia Coppola: The Politics of Pretty

a couple months ago Lana Del Rey released a self-titled controversial post on Instagram in which she aired grievances regarding the criticism she receives for her distinct brand of femininity comparing herself to other massively successful female artists many of whom are women of color Lana lamented that there was just no room for women like her in feminism she said there just has to be a place in feminism for women like me the kind of woman who says no but men hear yes the kind of women who are slated mercilessly for being their authentic delicate selves the kind of women who get their own stories and voices taken away from them by stronger women or by men who hate women now for multiple reasons her post was met with backlash for one in her clumsy comparison to other female artists she implied that these women have worked less hard to become universally acclaimed negating the fact that many of these women of color artists have had to break through insurmountable barriers to get to where they are today for another her poor phrasing made it seem like Lana's brand of delicate feminism was the first of its kind negating the facts that there have been many women before her who have worked to solidify soft femininity in the culture so today we want to look at one of these women a pioneer of the delegates the Beautiful the Gloom of being female Sophia Coppola obviously doctor you've never been a 13 year old girl [Music] Sophia Coppola's career began in front of the camera appearing in her father's film since infancy but it was in his 1990 film The Godfather Part 3 that Coppola took on her most infamous acting role as Mary Corleone stepping in as a last minute replacement for Winona Ryder although the performance put her name on the map it was largely dragged through the mud by audiences and critics alike Coppola escapegoated as the final Godfather film's main flaw and earned two razzies for her universally hated performance in a piece written about her role in the film mayuka-sen draws the clear parallels between Coppola and Mary a role her father has claimed to have based off of her Sophia like Mary was a casualty of her own father's Grand and mighty Ambitions and the burden of his failures fell squarely upon her for years Sophia's name was the butt of a cultural punchline synonymous with nepotism until she redeemed herself with her directorial debut what is this entirely true though some of Coppola's works as a director have been met with the highest of accolades others have received the same nepotism side eye as her brief acting career and while there are valid criticisms to be made about her films it's difficult to ignore the sexist undertones waged at her by a majority male critics the films directed by Sophia Coppola can all in some way or another be described through the vague and often lazy use of the term girly her films do share common themes The Emptiness of living in excess alienation girlhood as well as the kinds of picturesque visuals that have been characteristic of Coppola as a director but to lump them all together under the nondescript category of Gurley is to dismiss the content of each individual film and as a result the woman behind them looking past Sofia Coppola's veneer of pastel colored palettes and indie rock scores you'll find a filmmaker reimagining major moments in history Through The Eyes of young women whose circumstances mirror her own and this is a unique albeit problematic take that's nonetheless worth unpacking the language of the attacks waged against Coppola's films that there uncritically rendered a daydreamy and gorgeous looking souffle or it's only for girls and gays or this is like a manicurist claiming to capture the inner experience of your pinky is unmistakably gendered and this shouldn't go unnoticed in her passionate scholarly defense of Coppola Anna backman Rogers States the misogynist implication that is embarrassingly evident here is that Coppola's pretty and decorative Mison sen is taken to signify nothing Beyond its pleasing service indeed her oove is frequently likened to cinematic pastry a delightful cream puff full of delicious air but lacking in meaty and masculine substance but if we look at a few of her films that supposedly lack substance The Virgin Suicides Marie Antoinette and the beguiled will find that her style of filmmaking has been greatly misinterpreted over the years in fact under couple is decidedly feminine oov lurks something much more complex Coppola grew up in a life of opulence sheltered from The Real World due to her family's Fame and wealth and this privileged yet isolated lifestyle is reflected heavily in her films what ties the beguiled Marie Antoinette and The Virgin Suicides together is that their stories occur at a moment of rupture at the breaking point of a society in Decline yet they are all was told from the privileged side with the beguiled we get the Civil War from the Viewpoint of white women living in the Confederacy with Marie Antoinette it's the French Revolution Through The Eyes of its most infamous Monarch and with the Virgin Suicides we're told the story of a conservative white middle-class Suburban family as the decline of Detroit Motor City occurs in the background but what sets these films apart is that they're deliberately a historical when Coppola chooses to situate her stories in a particular socio-historical moment she Narrows the lens her politics are all about the personal is political so rather than epic historical dramas we get psychological ruminations about selfhood identity and female adolescence her films are Awash with that feminine sensibility that Lana Del Rey holds so dear and this visual delicacy is part of her genius as Anna backman Rogers States this is the essence of Coppola's power as a filmmaker her images appear as pleasurable but denotes something we can only grasp by looking a skew or awry her images are troubling and vexing and this approach can be revolutionary in some instances and quite alienating in others the reason being that in her attempts to de-historicize particular political moments she erases the experiences of anyone she's unable to relate to which has resulted in a filmography that largely focuses on white wayfish and Wealthy women so with that let's start with an example of how this dehistoricization doesn't work the beguiled the beguiled is a remake of a 1971 Baroque melodrama starring Clint Eastwood it follows a group of women and girls who remain living at a nearly deserted Girl School in Virginia in 1864 as they take in a wounded Union soldier things unravel quickly as the ladies growing infatuation with the soldier quickly escalates to violence what was originally framed as a thriller about the horrors of female hysteria Geraldine Page possessive vindictive because I didn't go to your bed Elizabeth Hartman her passion latent and violent [Music] alive it's repackaged by Coppola as a meditation on female repression and restricted agency as the war blusters on around them the women are relegated to Simply sitting and waiting it out in isolation with the film's narrow aspect ratio and desaturated Palette we get a sense of suffocation Coppola turns the tables on us as the camera lingers on Colin Farrell's wounded body and Nicole Kidman restrains her urge to embrace him the women's lust is translated through stolen glances and their animosity through daggering looks while it can be understated how beautiful this film is and how it's another visual feat in the Coppola Canon the beguiled came to reveal some of her shortcomings as a director its source material the 1966 Southern Gothic by Thomas P cullinan featured a black female slave character who remains in the school as well as a biracial character who teaches the girls curiously Coppola chose to replace the biracial character with her favorite Kristen Dunst a white actress and leave out the slave character entirely in response to criticisms of this Coppola defended her decision saying that young girls watch my films and this was not the depiction of an African-American character I would want to show them but in the case of setting a film during the Civil War a topic that is still heavily debated in the U.S as white Southerners continue to fly Confederate flags and to deny the war's roots and racism Coppola's decision to leave out the black characters has serious political connotations in the beguiled as we watch the young girls carry out labor around the schoolyard with seeming ease even ambivalence it becomes all too clear that the horrific experiences of black slaves simply don't have weight or exist at all in Coppola's version of this house in defending this decision on the grounds that she doesn't want to depict black women in that way to her audience of young girls not only does she indicate that there's no strength to be seen in black female slaves she also demonstrates that she's incapable of writing these characters with Nuance or care in fact including a black female slave character would have done wonders for this film for one it would capture the heinousness of the Confederacy which in the actual film is portrayed as Ambiguously apolitical a well-written black female character would also show the resilience of these women in the face of incredible adversity most importantly by Framing a black character within the context of a Sophia Coppola film black women and girls would be able to see themselves in the soft femininity they're so often excluded from in Media this goes to show that ultimately Coppola only writes what she knows as mayuka sen puts it the characters who inhabit Sophia Coppola's worlds resemble avatars of Mary Corleone one percenter is imprisoned in their own kingdoms of Despair their anui is carceral some will invariably find this insufferable about her films rich white girls have governed our sympathy for decades and perhaps those sympathies should be directed elsewhere her aesthetic invites accusations of Acuity too she populates her frames with Artful antineesque posturing but this is a story that Sophia knows intimately because she was born into it so the beguiled is an example of how Coppola's attempts to examine history through an elite female gaze can go wrong but what's an example of how she might succeed in this regard well Marie Antoinette of course in this 2006 biopic of France's inFAMOUS or famously understood Monarch we followed the dolphine in her dreamlike state of denial were shown shot after shot of excessive consumption of cupcakes and macarons and frilly shoes while an outrageous post-punk soundtrack plays over top it was not well received at the time of its Premiere as critics and audiences were put off by its loose attempt at historical accuracy one critic wrote Marie Antoinette is about confinement in a gilded cage and perversely or not shows itself far more interested in the cage than in the prisoner but I'd like to argue that these judgments of the film as being too frivolous are actually pretty unfair in this case the thing is Coppola never meant to give us a detailed account of Antoinette's life as I said earlier she's more concerned with conveying complex moods and emotions through visuality than she is with the contrivances of plot what makes it successful where the beguiled isn't is that the French underclasses are sidelined for a reason where the beguiled does the work of erasing underprivileged people altogether their cast aside in Marie Antoinette's narrative to show her obliviousness to anything outside Versailles where the absence of the slaves leaves a massive elephant in the room in the beguiled in Marie Antoinette we aren't aware of the underclasses until the monarchs can't ignore them any longer in a poignant scene near the end of the film Marie and Louise stands tensely in their palace surrounded by their children and remaining staff as the shouting of the angry mob reverberates around them ultimately the visual metaphors are much stronger in this film Roger Ebert defended Marie Antoinette beautifully every criticism I have read of this film would alter its fragile magic and reduce its romantic and tragic poignancy to the level of an instructional film this is Sophia Coppola's third film centering on the loneliness of being female and surrounded by a world that knows how to use you but not how to value and understand you rather than a depiction of Marie Antoinette the ruler Coppola gave us a depiction of Marie Antoinette the girl of course the film deviates far from historical accuracy as Antoinette actually played a much larger role in the political decision-making of her notoriously indecisive husband but Coppola's goal was to convey the mood of a teenager the montages of treats and clothes and parties are paralleled almost one for one with shots of the delfine crying alone in an ornate room or sitting still amidst a mass of bustling Court folk these subtle shots tell us all we need to know about what's going on inside her head the vapidness of the imagery is a facade for the unbearable loneliness working beneath what Coppola screams to us in her stylish ways that while Marie Antoinette made many mistakes as a ruler her portrayal throughout history as a selfish pompous twit is grossly skewed let them eat cake that's such nonsense I would never say that at the end of the day she was just a girl as Ann Cohen States you get the sense that Kristen dunce Marie Antoinette actually could be down to earth if Society had ever required her to land there but as the queen she's expected to shine be better prettier more stylish more vivacious until she's vilified for it these depictions of privileged women under the microscope of society are where Sophia Coppola shines brightest again sen States directorially Sofia Coppola is at her most shrewd when she's examining these vagaries of teenage heartbreak it can be said that what she's referring to here is The Virgin Suicides the third and final film we'll be discussing in this video this 1999 feature debut based on Jeffrey eugenity's book of the same name follows the Lisbon girls Five Sisters under the repression of their strict Catholic mother and the events leading up to their eventual suicides it's told through the watchful eyes of a group of boys from their neighborhood whose obsession with the girls increases tenfold as they struggle to cope with the aftermath of their untimely deaths the book is a meditation on the horrors of middle class Suburbia on the mysteries of adolescence and it's a very difficult one to adapt because of its complex and poetic prose yet Coppola adapted it and like the beguiled she invoked in it a distinctly feminine perspective with a hypnotic soundtrack by French space pop Duo air and amazing subdued performances by Kristen Dunst Kathleen Turner James Wood and Hannah R Hall this was a formidable debut I was obsessed with The Virgin Suicides in high school Coppola portrayed the confusing mixture of emotions that I as a teenage girl was experiencing but lacked the tools to navigate and this is why it resonated with me like Marie Antoinette the girls are forcibly sheltered from the realities of the world around them literally trapped in their gilded cage as their mother forbids them to leave the house or go to school like Marie Antoinette their mother represents the ideals of a bygone era of a declining Society it takes place in a suburb of Detroit in the 1970s a period in which white people were exiting the city on mass and leaving black populations behind to struggle with an industry's exit inadequate tax base and few jobs in the city this was a time of Urban Decay and financial ruin while white populations had fled to comfortable albeit mundane lives in the outskirts this is reflected in the film as kobola hovers on the mundane and trivial aspects of suburban life a hazy playground a language Street miscellaneous clutter of the Lisbon house she frames the Lisbon family through windows and Telescope lenses as they burn under the scrutiny of their neighbors and although we see the Lisbon girls Through The Eyes of adolescent boys with allusions to sacrificial female figures like Lolita and Hamlet's Ophelia Coppola makes sure to give us an insight into the girl's psyches by washing her frames with deep blues and yellows again male critics brush it off as vacuous but like Marie Antoinette it's delicate and beautiful exteriors conveys something important beneath in the words of Rogers The Virgin Suicides is a film that Revels in beautiful surfaces but works to subvert those surfaces and reveals them as brittle Hollow and false because it's a better regime and ideology of images to which the film implies young women are forced to submit that forces upon the female body a form of Eternal death it's no mistake that The Virgin Suicides has become a cult favorite amongst young women this is Sophia Coppola at her best when describing the experience of reading Cecilia Lisbon's diary in The Virgin Suicides the narrator says we felt the imprisonment of being a girl the way it made your mind active and dreamy and how you ended up knowing which colors went together it could be argued that Sophia Coppola's films produce the same effect though they vary in time and location through a clear aesthetic vision and recurring themes of girlhood Coppola manages to code into the details of her films sensory triggers evoking feelings that can't be paralleled through words her preference for the understated or the unsaid over epic visuals or theatrical performances isn't due to a lack of substance but actually the opposite her stories are composed of the kind of microscopic matter that exists in the smaller moments of a story and yet feel fundamental to the experience of being a girl however just because these moments feel fundamental does not mean that the narratives that Coppola chooses to structure them within should be regarded as universal Coppola poses a powerful ability to transcend onto screen many of the feelings that accompany adolescence as a girl however her particular talent for portraying girlhood and the utter lack of women directors to achieve her kind of mainstream success within the film industry means that she alone has been tasked with being the director for the girls but is this Fair there are legitimate questions to be asked about the lack of diversity in Coppola's films and whether or not she feels capable of providing the same love and attention to young women of color that she gives to the Kirsten Dunst and Elle fannies of the world but Coppola is only a small piece of a system that has been actively excluding the stories and perspectives of women since far before her time the bigger issue may not be her limited worldview it may lie more in the fact that Hollywood refuses to make space for anyone capable of filling in the gaps left by Coppola and her peers it's important that we continue to ask why Coppola is often the only woman in the room why is the film industry content with letting in one or two female directors to tell their stories The Coming of Age films given to us by Amy heckerling Greta Gerwig and Sophia Coppola are wonderful but to limit directorial opportunities to these women alone perpetuates the film industry's imagining of girlhood as invariably white and usually wealthy like all directors Sophia has flaws but what's most upsetting about the majority of criticisms waged at her is that they put down the very thing that makes her an auteur what sets her apart from other directors is that her films reveal the process by which an image comes to be meaningful culturally how images function as cliches that in turn inform our understanding of relations of power why is it that we praise filmmakers at the silent era for their evocative visual storytelling yet we criticize kobola for the very same thing she resonates with female audiences because well unlike the rest of Hollywood she takes us seriously she shows us the underbelly of femininity how it can be dark and grotesque and she does it with subtlety The Genius of her filmmaking is its ephemera you're entranced by the beauty of these films as you watch them and struck with Melancholy for days after her ability to evoke this Indescribable emotion within her viewers is what makes Sophia Coppola a master of her medium [Music]

Channel: Broey Deschanel

Views: 1,895,620

Keywords: sofia coppola, video essay, kristen dunst, marie antoinette, elle fanning, nicole kidman, the beguiled, lost in translation, cottage core, lana del rey, beyonce, doja cat, nicki minaj, dark academia, wes anderson, coppola, francis ford coppola, the godfather, the godfather iii

Id: 65lUqc_fCig

Length: 21min 49sec (1309 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 01 2020