Sofia Coppola: A Cinema of Girlhood

• Published in: Offscreen 2017-06, Vol.21 (6)
• Main Author: Lennon, Elaine
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Blogs; Celebrities; Coppola, Sofia; Culture; Empowerment; Fashion designers; Marie Antoinette, Queen of France (1755-1793); Motion picture directors & producers; Writers
• ISSN: 1712-9559

Family tragedy in the form of the loss of her older brother Gio is indirectly recalled in the Lisbon girls’ deaths in The Virgin Suicides and the death of her children and her own anticipated death by hanging in Marie Antoinette as the sun sets on Versailles; the use of fashion as power in The Bling Ring (2013), a premise that cultivates the paradoxical promise of individual celebrity power through mass production (and product placement), summons up Coppola’s original avocation. The heavily-worked argument makes for difficult reading but gets there in the end as the author suggests that despite its definition as gendered (female) space Coppola’s lost girls never fully achieve maturation and they can make home anywhere – hotels, palaces, but they are never truly at home in a relational argument that uses the imprisoning location as metaphor for girls’ bodies. The big idea of the ironised blurring of the public and private which lately limits female experience to repetitive experiences (remember cupcake-making, that particularly Noughties fad?) but promises escape through the mediating links of television, the internet and music to outside worlds, is finally compared with the mutating body of Alice in Wonderland, a girl who literally gets too big to be contained psychologically by the domestic space. The insistence by cinematographer Harris Savides that she shoot this way, using different styles for every burglary, plays into the thematic motifs of the film itself – surveillance, paparazzi, reality TV, second-hand goods covetable only because of their prior ownership by D-list celebrities famous for displaying their lives.