What’s Your Take On Sofia Coppola?
Like many of her films, The Bling Ring is being dissed for its focus on spoiled rich kids. But is the criticism warranted?
If you believe her critics, Academy Award-winning writer/director Sofia Coppola has a problem with anyone who isn’t white and affluent. She’s “superficial”, a “pampered princess”, and makes “shallow film[s] about shallow people”, say the reviewers. J.R. Jones of the Chicago Reader put it very succinctly when critiquing Coppola’s last film, the coolly-received Somewhere (2010), by stating: “(If) you’re impressed by the fact that this won the Golden Lion at Venice, go look up the price of a flight to Venice.”
It’s true that the majority of Coppola’s five films as director have dealt with the insular world of the rich and famous: an aging actor experiencing an existential crisis in Lost In Translation (2003), the very literal Queen of France in Marie Antoinette (2006), and a Hollywood movie star struggling with the daily challenges of parental responsibility in Somewhere. Coppola certainly works within a niche, but to look at her films in only a class-oriented fashion is doing them a great disservice, as they’re each filled with their own unique preoccupations.
–
“I am tired of myself tonight. I should like to be someone else.” – Oscar Wilde, The Picture Of Dorian Gray
Coppola’s latest film is The Bling Ring, a ripped-from-the-headlines affair that’s as polished and emotionally vacant as one would expect from a film about a group of teenagers who idolise Paris Hilton and her Hollywood Hills ilk. Adapted from Nancy Jo Sales’ Vanity Fair article, ‘The Suspects Wore Louboutins’ (I wish they’d kept that fabulous title, don’t you?), it coolly observes the exploits of the infamous ‘Bling Ring’, who broke into celebrities’ houses between October 2008 and August 2009 and stole millions of dollars of loot.
The film will probably annoy many given it doesn’t pronounce its ideas and themes with reels of exposition and filmmaking exclamation marks. Coppola’s unflinching portrayal is social commentary disguised as teen fantasy, superbly photographed by the late Harris Savides and with pitch perfect acting, especially from Harry Potter alumnus Emma Watson. The revolving closet of expensive clothes and bling that these kids steal are not only gawk-worthy, but a metaphor for Hollywood’s (and a whole generation’s) rampant materialism. It took Paris Hilton two months to realise she’d even been robbed!
In that regard, it’s most similar to Marie Antoinette, Coppola’s revisionist New Wave take on the famously beheaded French queen. Coppola’s very feminine film and its pastel palette is practically obsessed with the billowing dresses, petite shoes, cascading wigs, scrumptious sweets and opulent grounds of Versailles that dominated Marie’s life. It’s quite easy to read the film as a sensitive period interpretation of the aforementioned Paris Hilton: a young woman thrust into a life of excess who’s demonised for not knowing how to handle it.
–
Between ennui and ecstasy
Coppola’s fascination with generational ennui was on display right from her first film, the adaptation of Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides (1993). Through her now trademark longshots and carefully constructed soundtracks, Coppola explored the way society often treats young women, placing them on pedestals and surrounding them with unattainable expectations.
Similarly, Somewhere offered a look at a rare father-daughter drama that identified most strongly with the teenage girl at its centre (played by Elle Fanning). One scene in particular, set to the cooing melody of Gwen Stefani’s ‘Cool’, offered a blissful representation of what Coppola does better than almost anybody else: peeling back layers of excess to find single, simple truths.
Coppola’s most well-loved film — Lost In Translation, for which she won the Oscar for ‘Best Screenplay’ and became only the third woman to be nominated in the ‘Best Director’ category — stars Scarlett Johansson as a Sofia Coppola proxy hiding in the shadow of her absent husband and Bill Murray as a world-weary actor with whom she forges an unforgettable (and refreshingly unromantic) bond. It’s her warmest film to date, and the best example of her fine china fragility. A masterpiece of mood that brims with sadness and hope in equal measure, it’s also a rare moment of Coppola artistically working through issues in her personal life (she and director Spike Jonze divorced just months after the film’s premiere).
–
Coppola and the feminine POV
If her recent films have proven anything, it’s that they require patience and a hearty allegiance to the female POV. I suspect it’s this very feminine stylisation that has many seeing red (or hot pink?). Coppola is a director that doesn’t simply make films about women, but imbues them with what some may call a ‘girly’ aesthetic. Much like Marie Antoinette‘s lavish preoccupations, The Bling Ring‘s lingering emphasis on the fringe of a purse or the hem of a skirt is indicative of a style that flies in the face of most acclaimed American directors (generally all male).
As Emily Nussbaum recently argued in a piece for The New Yorker, which examined the reasons behind a recent tumble in the reputation of one-time TV hit Sex And The City, it’s an aesthetic that’s often derided: “It’s a classic misunderstanding,” she said, “stemming from an unexamined hierarchy: the assumption that anything stylized (or formulaic, or pleasurable, or funny, or feminine, or explicit about sex rather than about violence, or made collaboratively) must be inferior.”
–
Like criticisms towards Lena Dunham and Girls’ all-white cast, I think the arguments aimed at Coppola (including claims of nepotism that have followed her ever since she took a role in father Francis Ford’s The Godfather Part III) are rather baseless — it’s hardly her fault that she was born into money. The number of critics that think she should apologise for that is alarming. I admire that her films in equal part console and confront their subjects’ vapidness, asking “Is it really their fault?”
The characters of The Bling Ring, Marie Antoinette, Somewhere, and even Lost In Translation may exist in a bubble that is predominantly white and affluent, but they’re products of their surroundings. Coppola sympathises, whilst acknowledging the absurdity. The Bling Ring is an achievement in the way it challenges audiences to engage with and confront a society we’ve allowed to happen through unhealthy obsessions with reality television and hero worship of people like the Kardashians. It’s a dark indictment, albeit one in Jimmy Choos and Louis Vuitton.
–
The Bling Ring is now showing in cinemas nationally.
–
Glenn Dunks is a freelance writer and film critic from Melbourne, and currently based in New York City. His work has been seen online (Onya Magazine, Quickflix), in print (The Big Issue, Metro Magazine, Intellect Books Ltd’s World Film Locations: Melbourne), as well as heard on Joy 94.9.