It is said that some journalists dared ask Tina Turner whether she wanted to forget her difficult past. Sure, she replied, if only you all just stopped reminding me of it… In the same way, we should stop thinking of Sofia Coppola, established award-winning filmmaker, as the ‘daughter of’. Mrs. Coppola has a standing that is all her doing, and her cinema is unmistakably hers, too.
We shall add that, given the size of her father’s figure, Sofia Coppola defended her position in the best of ways. Many end up taking a completely different path, rather than confronting the weight of a famous parent in the same industry. Surely, in her case, benefits outweighed any negatives in belonging to a community (‘family’ seemed limited) that built such an important piece of American cinema over the last fifty years.
Critics haven’t been always impressed with her work, though that didn’t prevent her from getting recognition: a (challenged) Golden Lion in 2010 for Somewhere and a Golden Glove and an Oscar for Lost in Translation. It seems that occasionally she won’t be forgiven a somewhat cold style, detached, viz. the stories in her films. Is this a consequence of being compared with her father’s style, who is known to go all-in in regards to almost physical strength in his films?
In reality, Sofia is deeply American, as much as Francis Ford is proudly Italian (food, lyricism, familism). The difference is apparent since her explosive debut in 1999 with The Virgin Suicides. In it, more than the moralistic education of the fair-haired girls and more than a generic depiction of teenage mal de vivre, what we see is a harsh look on the 1970s: in the film, a nightmare we should quickly take our distances from.
From that point on, her career grows on what seems like an obsession on incommunicability and solitude as recurring themes: between young men and women, within the same gang (Bling Ring), in past epochs (Marie Antoinette), in a futuristic Japan where a maladjusted young woman bonds with a confused Bill Murrey. Murrey is an icon actor for Coppola, if anything, for the mere fact that instead of continually talking, he knows how to listen. Lastly, there’s a couple (On the Rocks) who talk incessantly, but never get to understand one another.
Born in 1945, Priscilla Ann Wagner Beaulieu was only fourteen when she captured the attention of Elvis Presley, at the time twenty-four and already a celebrity, during his military service in Germany. The two married on May 1, 1967, and had one daughter, Lisa Marie, before sep...
All beautiful, blond, and unhappy: in his debut feature, Sofia Coppola tears to pieces the false American Dream of youth nobody ever listens to.
Both different in their own solitudes, Bob and Charlotte live an impossible love in a surreal Tokyo, concluded in an amazing, ever-so-tender ending.
The wife of the kind is the first woman, the most appreciated woman, the most feared woman—but she is also a prisoner in her role. Also, revolution lurks in the shadows.
A gang of silly teenage girls, plus one silly teenage boy, go crazy out and about in Los Angeles to rob VIPs. Behind the craziness, there is deep, overexposed misunderstanding.
Coppola insists on non-relationships based on divided lives that won’t communicate, and tells the story of her (usual) couple-in-crisis by casting an unusual Bill Murray.
