Let Them Eat Cake
A quick guide to the world of Sofia Coppola
This week’s issue is a special collaboration with a local arts organization called The 525 and their exhibition, “Good Looking” by Delaney Yvonne.
A guide to the world of Sofia Coppola
The Virgin Suicides (1999) — Tied with Lost in Translation for the most popular of her films on Letterboxd, The Virgin Suicides was an audacious debut for the young Coppola. From her fluxional reflection of the joys and horrors of teenage girlhood, to her meta-analysis of the gilded cage from which she herself sprang, The Virgin Suicides shows early signs of the themes that would haunt her work for decades to come.
Lost in Translation (2003) — A foray into auto fiction, Lost is believed to represent Coppola’s own ill-fated relationship with fellow director Spike Jonze (loosely portrayed by Giovanni Ribisi). Likewise, Scarlett Johansson’s character is a stand-in for Coppola herself, floating in space along with fellow traveler Bill Murray. There is a quiet sadness between the two, which they fall into easily, tenderly. Watching in quick succession with Coppola’s later work, I see more clearly her keen ability to imbue her films with characters who are both rich, yet miserable; miserable, yet optimistic; optimistic, yet unambitious. They are full of contrasts, heightened by their aesthetic sensibilities which mirror her own. It’s an impressive line to toe, to be able to compile a biting ethnography of the upper class from the inside, while still portraying it in such a way that it’s clear she could have ended up anywhere else (nor would she have really wanted to).
Marie Antoinette (2006) — “You never reach for anything,” Marie Antoinette’s lady-in-waiting says, both instruction and command. It’s through Marie that Coppola sharpens her feminine punk aesthetics, to varying degrees of success. The first time I watched the film, I was stunned by Coppola’s use of silence followed by thunderous synth while scoring Marie’s rapid ascent into womanhood as she ascends the throne as well. In fact, Coppola’s well-known for an anachronistic or unexpected needle drop, from The Jesus and Mary Chain in Lost to Spectrum in Priscilla. “She looks like a child,” one woman remarks early on about Marie—in fact, Marie’s perceived innocence is a mainstay throughout the film, and it is not until the end that we see how she has forced herself to become more capable, though it is of course much too late.
Somewhere (2010) — A man with a faded star watches as thin blonde women dance up down a pole in his room. He keeps nodding off when they visit; they keep coming back. In one scene, one of the women leans over and blows a bubble with her hot pink gum. The next time he wakes up there’s another young blonde in his bed: his daughter, portrayed by a preteen Elle Fanning. She’s come to visit at the Chateau Marmont—where he lives—leading him to realize that he needs to finally get his shit together. A nod to the dynamic between Murray and Johansson Lost in Translation (minus the sexual tension), while also a hint at the father/daughter relationship that Coppola would later revisit in On the Rocks (which I haven’t seen yet—is it worth it??)
The Beguiled (2017) — One of Coppola’s more controversial works, the film features Elle Fanning, Kirsten Dunst, Nicole Kidman. Offering a thematic parallel to The Virgin Suicides by centering on a group of white Confederate women who are isolated to the point of madness, The Beguiled follows their descent into a wild sexual furor when a wounded Union soldier played by Colin Farrell arrives.
Priscilla (2023) — I wrote about Priscilla back in November, arguing that Coppola’s “strengths lie in adapting highly unusual biographies of iconic women into fables universal in their pain.” I’m not sure whether I would still classify her work as universal, but rather myopic with its insights. And yet despite her ostentatious visuals, Coppola seems concerned first and foremost with relationships. In Priscilla, a young woman realizes she’s become a doll in the doll house’s of Graceland. By Marie Antoinette’s end, she is with her husband and children who had sprung into the story fully formed the moment she first had sex.
Looking back at Coppola’s work, I’m intrigued by the recurring patterns, the frayed edges she can’t quit poking: the line between fathers and daughters, or husbands and wives. In chronological order, Coppola’s filmography has almost a fairytale quality. A group of sisters collapse in on themselves with grief; a lost young woman meets an equally lost older man; a young woman marries into a dark fairytale she doesn’t yet understand; a girl visits her hard-partying father to reconnect; a group of women go mad with erotic fervour; and a young woman marries an older man, only to be subsumed into his messianic charm. From my November review:
“From the first moment we see Jacob Elordi (of Euphoria fame) as Elvis, it is through the eyes of 14-year old Priscilla, witnessing a god from across a crowded room. My friends and I kept turning to each other in horror every time their ten-year age gap was referenced; accentuated by their height difference, he feels all the more like a wolf stalking his prey. He’s a perfect Elvis: boyish and tall, with a dreamy face tinted by a slithering darkness behind the eyes.
One moment, she’s a normal teenage girl, and the next, there he is: the most famous singer in the world, turning his light towards her. She practically basks in his glory, which she manipulates to her own ends to achieve freedom from her family, school, and the shackles of an ordinary life. Yet once she arrives in Graceland, she realizes that the key to her cage has merely changed hands from her father to her boyfriend. He chooses her babydoll dresses, he instructs her in what to wear, how to dress, and how to behave. Keep in mind, at this point she hasn’t even graduated high school yet.
She swallows the pain of his infidelity, trading it for the comfort of his hand in marriage, while he continues to treat her as a doll, pristine and pure. In a rage at her perceived nagging, he hisses, “I need a woman who understands that things like this might happen. Are you going to be here or not?”
As this Priscilla review notes, “Sofia Coppola’s girls want, but do not get.” It’s all the more agonizing then to watch Priscilla fumble through early adulthood into marriage and motherhood all while resembling a childlike doll herself. She aches and yearns, it’s what drove her into the arms of her idol in the first place; but he’s incapable of giving in to her, he requires that subservience to give him reason for living and being. The women around Elvis are no more meaningful than a plaything, with even his grandmother becoming a live-in caretaker for his wife and child. He’d become a messianic figure to his acolytes in his own search for meaning as someone deified without a sense of purpose of his own, and the waifish Priscilla can’t decipher how to provide it.
While unevenly-paced and lacking the sumptuous visuals that made Marie Antoinette so iconic, Priscilla feels purposefully claustrophobic, and it isn’t until *spoiler* our heroine leaves the man himself that we see her emerge as a fully-fledged human from the shallow drudgery of Graceland. Her fate is not unlike that of her mother, who we mostly only ever see frowning in her family kitchen. Unfortunately, Priscilla’s freedom only comes in the last frame. Worse still, the real Priscilla’s legacy remains deeply entwined with Elvis’, though the real tragedy is the years of her life she spent trying to save him, only to be rejected by him at every turn.
Cailee Spaeny plays Priscilla delicately, watchfully, and at times stubbornly. By the time Priscilla starts blowing up at Elvis the way he does at her, it feels completely out of place. But perhaps that’s the point, as she looks like a child having a tantrum. He laughs her off, continuing to hunt her down and wear her down until there’s nothing much left of either of them. It isn’t until she’s able to understand herself as a woman capable of desire outside of his gaze that she emerges from his gilded cage. It’s telling, then, that when she finally leaves, she’s wearing pants.”