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This is an electronic version of an essay published in Feminist Media Studies, 13:1 (2013): 148-162. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2011.595425

Sofia Coppola: Reading the Director

Belinda Smaill Monash University

Abstract

Sofia Coppola is currently one of the most discussed female filmmakers in

Hollywood and one of the most prominent “indie” directors working over the last

decade. Coppola has also divided critics, especially with her third and fourth features,

Marie Antoinette and Somewhere both drawing heavy criticism. This article draws on

a range of popular and scholarly sources in order to chart the different narratives that

construct Coppola’s public image, including the style of her filmmaking. I focus on

perspectives of Coppola’s work, investigating how the director’s biographical details

have become bound up with the reception of her films in ways that dismiss her films

as too preoccupied with frivolity and privilege. Coppola’s important position as a

female director of independent features, specifically her unique position as a

successful woman working in the masculinised arena of independent Hollywood, and

her place within a lineage of women’s cinema, is frequently elided in discussions of

her success and style. It is the question of Coppola’s status as a female director, the

ambivalent process by which this status is acknowledged and disavowed in the

reception of her work, that is most compelling for feminist film theory.

Article

In an article for Vanity Fair, Evgenia Peretz observes that filmmaker Sofia

Coppola has reached “iconic stature.” She goes on to write:

It might be tempting to dismiss Coppola as a ditz who has successfully parlayed

her famous name, the right clothes, and the right friends into an overblown

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image, if it weren’t for the enormous, deserved success she has had as a

director, whose three films seem to be extensions of herself: ethereal, stylish,

child-like, yet powerful.

This quote encapsulates a number of the narratives that circulate around Coppola and

contribute to her image as a director and as a name brand. Reviewers have variously

credited her films as exploring sophisticated humanist questions and as overly

concerned with image, fashion and frivolity. Further, her career has been attributed to

both her privileged status as the daughter of Hollywood royalty (her father is Francis

Ford Coppola) and her abilities as an independent, skilled filmmaker and writer. At

times, these divergent assessments are reconciled in the service of highlighting the

deservedness of Coppola’s success as a director, as demonstrated in Peretz’s quote,

while others characterize her cinema as an inferior version of a more worthy art

cinema. Coppola’s oeuvre is not sizeable, with only four feature films to date: The

Virgin Suicides (1999), Lost in Translation (2003), Marie Antoinette (2006) and

Somewhere (2010). While all present significantly different subject matter, all four

films display a consistent and distinctly impressionist, directorial signature. It is this

style and sensibility that has become bound up with her public persona, exemplified

by Petertz’s notion that they “seem to be extensions of herself.”

Dana Polan writes that a woman’s name “can refer [. . ] to the complicated

destiny of the female artist, especially in a domain such as the cinema so frequently

dominated by men” (10). Discussing the auteurism of Jane Campion, Polan refers

here to the critical framing of directors of the studio system, as male and as “heroes”

with a “virile” and forceful will to stamp their identity on films. It the notion of

delineating an auteur character, against the strong historical model of the masculine

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director, which I wish, in part, to address. The name of “Sofia Coppola” has

increasingly taken on significance as a woman’s name in a way that rivals “Coppola”

as a name that signifies dynastic connections. Reviews have referred to her narrative

emphasis on “girlhood” and the feminine, ethereal tone of her films as a way to frame

her directorial signature. It is perhaps because of her assumed access to Hollywood

power and patriarchy that her female auteurism and the “complicated destiny” that

Polan refers to has been little discussed in relation to Coppola’s career. Coppola is

arguably the most successful American female director of her generation. Yet, beyond

her much cited achievement of being the first American woman to be nominated for

an Oscar for best director, Coppola’s status and career trajectory as a female

filmmaker has gained little attention.

While Coppola is not the only filmmaker to divide audiences, I argue that her

director brand or name is unique in contemporary American cinema and this unique

position influences the reception of her films. In this essay I draw on a range of

popular and scholarly sources in order to chart the different narratives that construct

Coppola’s public image. I also investigate how the emphasis on mise-en-scène and

atmosphere in her films, as well as the similarities between her investigation of

privileged, transitory lifeworlds on screen and her own well-known background,

facilitate some of these narratives. While I discuss how her films have contributed to

her image, my aim is not to undertake a close reading of her work per se. My interest

here is, rather, in unraveling how Coppola’s particular admixture of biography and

cinematic style (within the given industrial context), has lead to significant success

and also to derision and reproach. Coppola’s important position as a female director

of independent features, specifically her unique position as a successful woman

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working in the masculinised arena of independent Hollywood, and her place within a

lineage of women’s cinema, is frequently elided in discussions of her success and

style. It is the question of Coppola’s status as a female director, the ambivalent

process by which this status is acknowledged and disavowed in the reception of her

work, that is most compelling for feminist film theory.

An Unworthy Cinema and the Personalisation of Coppola’s Oeuvre

The plots of Coppola’s films possess a specific architecture; they are simple

and uncluttered, the vehicles for carefully composed imagery and the subtle evocation

of mood and affect. All of her films feature characters, both female and male, caught

in moments of transition. Yet, in the trilogy composed of her first three features, the

most consistent sites of fascination and exploration are young women. These are

women engaged in “rites of passage,” whether it is the adolescence and first romance

of Lux in The Virgin Suicides, Charlotte’s search for direction in Lost In Translation

or a young bride’s perplexing experience entering the French court in Marie

Antoinette. They are characters on the cusp of revelation and change. Equally

apparent in her films is the primacy of the image; the beauty of sunlit blonde hair, the

oddly subdued vista of a Shinto wedding in the heart of Tokyo or small colourful

figures, framed at a distance, scattered on the expansive steps at Versailles. Her films

exploit the potential of composition and the texture of the image in order to invoke

emotion and often this emotion is expressed through alienation and displacement.

This emphasis on visual style and mood is one reason why it is easy to

characterize Coppola’s films as being focused on the pictorial aspects of cinema at the

expense of the deeper meaning potentially produced by the permutations of plot and

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narrative. Coppola’s own descriptions in interviews have, at times, fed this

characterization. Describing the genesis of Lost in Translation she notes: “I knew I

wanted to shoot in Tokyo and I that I wanted those two characters. I wanted to have a

romantic melancholy, like when you have a crush. I like starting with the atmosphere

and then thinking about the music and how it might look” (Olsen, 14). This

motivation, centered on the “look” of the film rather than the story can be taken to

connote superficiality and emptiness, qualities that have been measured against

Coppola’s own perceived personal traits and lifestyle.

In her study of French filmmaker, Claire Denis, Judith Mayne writes:

it is common to describe Denis as a filmmaker “of the image,” that is, a

filmmaker devoted to formal innovation and aesthetic beauty rather than a story.

This is a misleading description, since it suggests that filmmakers (and

audiences) have to choose between the two. There is unquestionable cinematic

beauty to Denis’ films, but never does beauty function in some isolated realm of

cinematic purity. Claire Denis’s cinema is a cinema fully engaged with a

complex world. (1-2)

Mayne’s focus on perceptions of Denis’s cinema reconciles the terms of surface and

depth, image and complexity. She draws attention to these as multiple and interrelated

facets of the French director’s work. The aptness of this comparison with Denis’s

cinema demonstrates what many critics have observed; although they are firmly

entrenched in the sphere of American cinema, Coppola’s films reflect a European

sensibility. This is a style that is frequently framed through a comparison with the

work of Italian filmmaker, Michelangelo Antonioni. Significantly, neither Denis (as a

filmmaker of the image) nor Antonioni (whose films concentrate on “the surface of

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the world as he sees it” (Chatman, 2)) suffers from the crisis of credibility that has

plagued Coppola at times in her career.

Reviews of Coppola’s most recent film, Somewhere, have been extremely

mixed, mirroring the critical reception of her previous film, Marie Antoinette. A.O

Scott in the New York Times praises Somewhere: “Ms. Coppola illuminates the

bubble of fame and privilege from the inside and maps its emotional and existential

contours with unnerving precision and disarming sensitivity.” Others have observed

her discerning eye for the detail of human emotions and interactions.1 Yet, there is a

significant portion of equally negative reviews. Jim Schembri describes Somewhere

as a “cosmically overrated, emotionally vacant micro-drama.” Todd McCarthy writes

“this junior league Antonioniesque study of dislocation and aimlessness is attractive

but parched in the manner of its dominant Los Angeles setting, and it’s a toss-up as to

whether the film is about vacuity or is simply vacuous itself.” McCarthy’s criticism

indicates one way in which critics in the popular press have deemed Coppola’s

cinema as an unworthy or questionable art cinema, one that does not infuse the

minimalism of its plots and carefully composed imagery with adequate cultural

relevance and complexity.

In the case of a strong director brand such as Coppola’s, the persona of the

director is not only employed to market the film to a particular audience, but it also

plays a role in the reception of the film. Due to the way they meditate on the

vicissitudes of inner experience, all of Coppola’s films have a personal quality. Her

trilogy emphasizes the experiences of privileged young women in phases of

transition. These factors contribute to an ease of alignment between director and film.

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While Peretz’s characterization above draws this alignment in the service of a

favorable appraisal, such a personalization has also been used to describe Coppola’s

lack of credibility as a director.

As the daughter of Francis Ford Coppola, Sofia Coppola grew up in the 1970s

and 1980s enjoying both affluence and exposure to the social world of Hollywood.

She was also interpolated into the domain of filmmaking. She travelled to various

locations for her fathers work, including Manila where she lived as a child while

Apocalypse Now (1979) was shot. She also had small acting parts in a number of her

father’s films, including Rumblefish (1983), The Outsiders (1983) and Peggy Sue Got

Married (1986). Her most discussed and final role was as Mary Corleone in The

Godfather, Part III (1990). She had been asked to stand in at the last minute when

Winona Ryder, who had originally been cast in the role, pulled out. Her acting

abilities were widely derided by critics at the time. She attended the California

Institute for the Arts and practiced photography, her work appearing in magazines

such as Paris Vogue and Allure. Coppola is also known for her work in fashion

design—she co-founded a clothing label based in Japan called Milk Fed and launched

her own boutique, Heaven-27, in order to retail the Milk Fed line. The director has

been the muse, friend and occasional model for American designer Marc Jacobs.

Coppola has strong ties to not only the fashion and film worlds, but also the

independent music scene. Her current partner is Thomas Mars, vocalist for French

band, Phoenix and Coppola has directed music clips for groups such as Air, The

White Stripes and The Flaming Lips.

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Coppola’s accumulated ventures and connections in the worlds of fashion,

filmmaking, “indie” music, in conjunction with her privileged Hollywood family

background, contributed to her image, early in her filmmaking career, as a dilettante

socialite.2 This was especially the case after the release of her first feature, The Virgin

Suicides (1999). Speaking to Ray Pride at this time Coppola says “I only want to

make a couple of films in my lifetime. I don’t want it to be like a job. That’s not the

reason I want to make movies. I hope to find another story that is personal. There are

so many movies out there. I don’t want to just put stuff out” (18). This expresses two

different, although not irreconcilable, dimensions of her director image. She speaks

simultaneously of her integrity for her desired cinema ideal and her privileged

position that allows her to change her career at will, a position that serves to enhance

her reputation as a dilettante. In another review of Somewhere, David Jenkins

questions “whether [Coppola’s] ongoing concerns regarding the alienation suffered by

the pampered, beautiful elite (a world she obviously knows very well) coalesce into a

satisfying body of work [. . .]”. Jenkins’s remark offers an example of how Coppola’s

films have, at times, been perceived as straightforward reflections of the narrow,

privileged lifestyle Coppola herself is associated with. In this instance, the mirroring

of Coppola’s affluence and bourgeois lifestyle is tied to the film’s deficit of quality.3

In one sense, the association between a culture of affluence and a lack of merit

can be understood by way of a problem of appropriate taste formations and the

industrial context structuring the reception of the film. These formations are described

by Diane Negra as “a certain aesthetic and status economy with which independent

film-goers are likely to affiliate” (71). As Negra notes, in the marketplace for

independent cinema, bohemian and fringe social values have been brought into line

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with “high-status leisure pursuits such as museum visits or concert attendances” (76).

This is as much a commercial alignment as a cultural one. For sometime the

marketing and distribution of independent cinema (often via the multiplex) has sought

to reconcile bohemian and bourgeois taste formations in order to maximise the

cinema going audience. Both positive and negative press has evaluated Coppola’s

films on their (and her) attunement to taste and a balancing of bourgeois and

bohemian credentials. When the disparity is too great the representation of affluence

is perceived as too unself-conscious and lacking in an ironising critique,4 thus

outweighing her “indie” style credentials (particularly those, as I explore below, in the

realm of fashion and music).

While critics regularly praise Coppola’s work on the basis of purely filmic and artistic

merit, a number continue to consistently link the characters, the aesthetic and the

settings of films (sometimes even the plot structure), to aspects of Coppola’s image,

personality and personal history.  As a filmmaker of the image with a preference for

minimal plots, Coppola is thought to fail when her characters are perceived as too

unselfconsciously linked to her own “world,” one of upper class insularity. With an

emphasis on female characters, this is, by default, a feminine world. The “iconic

stature” of Coppola’s image and the construction of her persona is reliant upon how

this construction can stabilise the taste economies of contemporary independent

cinema. When the balance is seen to be successfully achieved, it contributes to a

distinctive brand for Coppola in the milieu of independent American cinema.  

Women in Hollywood: Coppola as Auteur

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None of Coppola’s films are explicitly feminist in their message or sensibility.

Nevertheless, her films can be described as making themselves available to feminist

readings or debates5 and subtly emphasizing female experience, in the main due to the

central importance of layered female protagonists. Yet a key question, as I will

discuss, revolves around what a feminist reading of her films might produce.

Coppola’s films have only occasionally been explored from a feminist vantage point,6

with the greatest attention given to her position as a director of independent features.

Again, in this context she has been both celebrated and derided. In describing some of

the criticism of her films, Jesse Fox Mayshark recites the charge that “she is frivolous,

that her moves lack heft, that they look good but communicate little” (163).7

Significantly, he links this to her status as a female director:

There is some basis for these criticisms in all of Coppola’s films—her style is

ethereal, sometimes to the point of insubstantiality—but its hard to miss the

archly condescending tone with which some critics dismiss her, and hard to

wonder why exactly the most prominent female American director of her

generation elicits it. (Mayshark 163)

The condescending tone Mayshark observes is due, in part, to the coupling of

Coppola’s femininity and the surplus of class privilege discussed above. However, in

this section I investigate the different dimensions of Coppola’s female authorship.

Specifically, I explore the niche she occupies in relation to previous generations of

women working in, and on the independent fringe of, the Hollywood industrial

system. This niche has proved enabling, allowing Coppola to become, as Mayshark

describes, the most prominent female American director of her generation.

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In spite of the commercial publishing success of auteur studies, questions

regarding the director’s agency and creative vision will always be a problem for film

studies. Yet, where female directors are concerned, feminist debates around cultural

production and female subjectivity within the patriarchal system invigorate authorship

theories with a particular immediacy. In her analysis of women’s film authorship,

Catherine Grant observes

a reasonably confident return to considering various aspects of directorial

‘authors’ as agents: female subjects who have direct and reflexive, if obviously

not completely ‘intentional’ or determining, relationships to the cultural

products they help to produce, as well as to their reception; ones that, moreover,

will often repay explicit feminist investigation, on their own or as part of a

broader examination of ‘elite’ and other forms of cultural agency and agent-

hood available under patriarchy to particular women at particular times and in

particular places. (124)

Hollywood directors exemplify the “elite” cultural agency Grant refers to. With so

few women working as directors in mainstream commercial cinema, the field of

director, or auteur, studies still holds the potential to produce important insights into

and theorizations of women’s cinema and its relationship to the commercial system.

My interest in Coppola centers on how her femininity is constructed through a direct

relationship to the films that are signed with her name and within a field of discourses

and histories. That is, when she is read through what Pam Cook describes as an

approach that produces the auteur by way of “such cultural apparatuses and

technologies as: interview, criticism, publicity and circulation […]” (314).8 Coppola

makes for a compelling and unique object of study on these terms.

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She is constantly cited in studies of contemporary independent Hollywood as

one of the few women working in this milieu. Notably, this is a movement

characterized as much through a collection of high profile filmmakers as a grouping

of films, testimony to the importance of the directorial image or brand in this context.

However, Coppola demonstrates an uneasy fit in the sense that she departs from the

models established by a previous generation of prominent female directors working in

Anglophone cinemas. For example, she differs from Jane Campion whose films have

been taken up by feminist film scholars for their depiction of robust female

characters, victimised by cultural expectation and yet resisting the roles mapped out

for them in patriarchal society. Similarly, Coppola does not work within the

paradigms of commercial genre cinema as Kathryn Bigelow or Nora Ephron do,

succeeding on the terms set by the Hollywood mainstream. In this respect Coppola

defies easy labeling – her brand, as a female director, is without clear precedent.

Without an explicit gender or genre agenda in which to anchor them, Coppola’s films

could easily appear to “lack heft,” to borrow Mayshark’s words. Her identity as an

auteur is also complicated by her perceived lack of credibility and her dilettante

image.

This problem of credibility is intensified with the knowledge that Coppola did

not enter Hollywood from a position wholly outside the industry, as is almost always

the case with female directors. She did not undertake the progression from film school

through to the production of a low budget film as a calling card. Coppola began her

career from a position within the cultural heart of Hollywood and was in a privileged

position to fully realise the inspiration that motivated her first feature, The Virgin

Suicides. Coppola worked on her adaptation of the Jefferey Eugenides novel with no

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assurance that she would be able to direct the film because another company had

already optioned the rights. She eventually gave the finished screenplay to a producer

at her father’s production company, American Zoetrope, and to the people who

owned the rights to the book. Events conspired in such a way that Coppola was

offered the opportunity to direct with her father as one of the producers.9 While the

budget was not large by commercial standards, estimated at $US6 million, it is

notable that, as a first time director, she was able to recruit high caliber actors. As

James Mottram observes, “she had the connections to gather an esteemed supporting

cast” (249) that included James Woods, Scott Glenn, Kathleen Turner and Danny

DeVito. She also secured the young Kirsten Dunst to star as Lux.10

It would seem, from the evidence at hand in interviews and commentaries, that

Coppola’s films have been produced without the drive, the positioning for funding

and the compromises that other women in the industry speak of, such as subsidizing

their income directing for television.11 Yet, in other respects, her career shares a

strong affiliation with a cohort of filmmakers who have emerged in a specific cultural

and industrial moment in the history of American cinema. The 1980s saw a modest

wave of support for female filmmakers, evident in targeted distribution and funding

strategies that realized some of the ideals of the second wave feminism of the 1970s.12

Since the early 1990s this support has lessened while a new industrial terrain for the

production of independent features more broadly has emerged. Within this terrain, the

career of Coppola and of other (less visible) female directors, such as Lisa

Cholodenko, Kimberley Peirce, Rose Troche, Catherine Hardwicke, Nancy Savoca or

Debra Granik have taken shape. All have found ways and means of directing

independent feature films. The use of the term “independent Hollywood” has gained

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momentum over the past decade. Although the constitution of independent American

cinema is notoriously difficult to define,13 the feature films currently described by the

use of this term are part of a movement that has gathered pace since the early 1990s

and the materialization of an identifiable collection of filmmakers over this period is

well documented.

This milieu is usually associated with the work of directors such as Paul

Thomas Anderson, Spike Jonze, Wes Anderson, Steven Soderbergh, Quentin

Tarantino or David Fincher. They are not independent in the sense of being

autonomous of the dominant Hollywood system, largely because they are implicated

in funding and distribution structures that have commerce, rather than art, as their

core rationale.14 Nevertheless, this filmmaking milieu is one that has responded to the

blockbuster-focused industry of the 1980s with a desire to reprise the acclaimed

Hollywood renaissance of the 1970s (a period associated most with a small number of

highly visible and fêted male directors15). With her father one of the heavyweight

filmmakers of the time, Coppola herself has a certain connection with this celebrated

Hollywood era. She has referred to this in an interview in Sight and Sound:

There’s guys in my generation who are trying to recreate that thing they thought

was happening in the 1970s—lets have a filmmakers night and all hang out,

trying to make themselves into the gang they thought those guys were. But I

don’t know if it was what it appeared to be. Its easy to idealise that era, it seems

so macho and cool. Those guys really did seem like they were putting their

necks on the line and now it seems safer—nobody’s marching into the jungle to

make a movie. (Olsen, 15)

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Implicitly, Coppola is describing here the aura of the “auteur” as much as the

idealization of a bygone era—she references what as become a strong hallmark of the

new independent American cinema. This collection of directors, while still expanding,

has carved a reputation as a clique of maverick male auteurs. These are filmmakers

that are now renown for the impact they have made with their unorthodox and

idiosyncratic styles and for forging their own path in spite of the conservatism of the

Hollywood system. From this, the persona of the “cool” young outsider has emerged,

an image perhaps best exemplified by Tarantino. Indeed, “independent,” in this

respect, is as much a marketing category as an industrial one, with its own powerful

brand and set of connotations.

Christina Lane captures the development of this category in the 1990s when

she describes the growth of the brand as a marketing strategy and its impact on the

image of the female director:

[. . .] the traditional director’s ‘mystique’ of [male] auteurism pervaded the indie

festivals and independent studios’ marketing campaigns, excluding women

from increasingly commercialized imagery. As the 1990s continued, it became

less likely that films would be advertised on the basis of a ‘woman director,’

meaning that women filmmakers and ‘female genres’ became less marketable

and less marketed, in a reciprocal spiral. (201)

Coppola has managed to sidestep this problem of the gendered independent director

to some degree by creating her own version of “indie” capital and maintaining a

distance from the traditional, feminist inspired notion of a “woman’s cinema.”

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If Coppola has established a place of marketability and appeal in a way that

sits adjacent to the “maverick” filmmaking clique, this has been achieved by way of a

strong association with cult and indie culture. Aspects of this culture pervade the

design of her films while also framing her public image. Coppola has established, as I

have noted, a strong association with musicians, designers and artists while pursuing

her own various artistic endeavors. In her article in The Guardian Ella Taylor

identifies the bohemian kudos of this association: “Coppola hangs out with a crowd of

compulsive improvisers who are every bit as innovative in their own way as the

Wunderkinder of the 1970s of whom her father was arguably the king – but cooler,

more ironic and enigmatic, influenced by the staccato rhythms and experimentalism

of music video.” Further, the novel upon which The Virgin Suicides is based was

already acclaimed as a darkly innovative literary work, lending its fringe artistic

resonances to the film. Of most note, however, is the manner in which indie and post-

punk music is consistently featured in her films. Coppola’s first three films

distinguish themselves through their use of recognisable popular music tracks of the

last three decades, with their soundtracks achieving significant commercial success as

stand alone products.

Indeed, music is central to the overriding sensibility of the films and

Coppola’s signature style. It is not unusual for music, used extra-diegetically, to

enhance the ambiance and atmosphere of a scene and to convey, in affective ways, a

character’s experience and perspective. Yet, because they are so focused on

impressionistic representation, Coppola’s films take this to another degree. In his

description of Lost in Translation, Geoff King argues that the music in this film is

more than just an accompaniment to the visuals, rather it makes “what is probably the

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largest single contribution to the widespread understanding of the film as a ‘mood

piece’ as much as a production based around linear narrative progression” (Lost, 115).

The music in Lost in Translation and Marie Antoinette, in particular, not only sets the

tone of different scenes and character experiences, but the inclusion of tracks by well

known artists, such as My Bloody Valentine, Gang of Four, Jesus and Mary Chain,

Air and The Strokes, offers the films a significant weight of cultural cachet.

Coppola’s distinctive utilization of alternative music in these two films has enhanced

the aura that locates her entire oeuvre within a sub-cultural taste terrain, thus offering

them cult-distinction in the market place.

King describes, in his discussion of “Indiewood” cinema, how cultural

products constructed as alternative to the mainstream have, since the 1960s, been

commodified in ways that are sold as ‘hip’ and ‘cool’ and produce a form of “hip

consumerism” (15). He notes that this is very much a part of the Indiewood industry

and that what is commodified “can be a mix of cultural and sub-cultural capital, the

latter suggesting forms that can carry cachet as a result of not being officially

sanctioned but seen as existing in some kind of opposition to the mainstream”

(Indiewood, 15). Addressing a more discerning viewer, seeking “alternative” cultural

signifiers, while remaining commercially successful (in relative terms), Coppola’s

films and her personal image locate her brand favorably within the status economy of

independent cinema’s aesthetic hierarchies.

As demonstrated by Taylor’s characterisation, her associations with the golden

era of 1970s Hollywood, by way of her father, aid in this accumulation of sub-cultural

cache, even if her father’s power and skill as a director (and money) are occasionally

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mused to be the source of her success. Interestingly, a number of aspects of Coppola’s

personal biography that have been cited in ways that disparage her credibility (her

privileged position as part of Hollywood aristocracy, her preoccupation with the

pictorial qualities of cinema and her interest in fashion and music) are also those that

have allowed her to carve out a niche in the masculinist domain of independent

Hollywood.

This maximization of indie culture has occurred in tandem with a minimized

association with an established women’s cinema and gender politics. While they play

on audience knowledge of what are considered female genres, such as the romantic

comedy, the melodrama (Lost in Translation) and the costume drama (Marie

Antoinette), these examples are not clearly recognizable as genre films, which are

associated more with Hollywood than Indiewood. Moreover, with their focus on

image and style, they eschew the social realism favored by many female filmmakers.

Instead, her female protagonists embody “coolness” (in both senses of the word),

individualism and youthful allure (principally through the cache offered by actors

Scarlett Johansson and Kirsten Dunst). In one respect, they contribute to what Angela

McRobbie and others16 describe as a post-feminist rejection of popular feminism.

“Postfeminism” has seen the development of an image of femininity that appropriates

choice and self-empowerment in ways that would not be possible without histories of

feminist politics, and yet within this figuration, feminism is dismissed as no longer

relevant. This popular cultural movement attenuates the complexities of power

relations and gender inequalities through focusing, in part, on individual aspiration.

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The characters and plots in Coppola’s trilogy explore the figure of the isolated

female self, an individual grappling with a conundrum or challenge. This is perhaps

most evident in the character of Charlotte in Lost in Translation as she passes her time

in Tokyo in a stupor of longing and dreamlike displacement, seeking to find a life

path for herself. Her anxieties about the present and the future are conveyed, in sum,

in her confession to Bob as they lie together on the hotel bed: “I just don't know what

I'm supposed to be.” A similar sense of longing in The Virgin Suicides is followed by

resolve, with the eerie and irrationalised determination of the Lisbon girls to carry out

their suicide pact. While they narrativise the experience and conditional agency of

women, it is difficult to read this through the lens of a significant (collective) gender

politics. Further, any gendered sensibility in these three films overtly appeals to an

audience in a way that emphasises attributes of girlhood, beauty and poetic ambience.

Due to this stylistic interpretation of gender, they have, potentially, great appeal

within a contemporary post-feminist culture as well as within the industrial sphere of

independent Hollywood. While from this vantage Coppola’s films are effective in

minimising feminist references, there is another way of framing her film practice that

aligns it with traditions of women’s cinema.

Feminism and Ennui

If one shifts analytical focus away from the contemporary frame of

postfeminism and independent American cinema in favour of a broader historical

sweep, it is possible to understand Coppola’s cinema, and by inference her directorial

signature, as more entrenched in a feminist sensibility than is immediately apparent.

At the centre of this is the potential in, and tradition of, female ennui. Central to

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Coppola’s plots is an alternation between what happens and what fails to happen. Her

films highlight “waiting” and feature recurrent images of time passing and events

taking place without warning. Sometimes this happens emphatically, as in the case of

the suicide of the Lisbon girls in The Virgin Suicides, and sometimes this occurs as

something seemingly incidental that pushes along the sparse plot, such as Charlotte

hurting her toe, necessitating a trip to the hospital in Lost in Translation. The broader

sensibility evoked revolves around boredom, repetition and malaise. Charlotte

inhabits a certain stillness, accentuated by repeated images of her sitting in her hotel

room, gazing out the window at the Tokyo skyline. Indeed, the “coolness” and

expressionism I have noted is bound to the aesthetic potential of waiting and ennui.

Patrice Petro offers an insightful reassessment of boredom and repetition,

asking us to view them as sites of renewal and possibility. For Petro, they can offer a

new space for reflection, renewal and change. She identifies how central experiences

of ennui, banality and boredom have been to women’s lives, and women’s culture,

historically.17 Women’s experiences of everyday life, are, in this instance,

transformed into symbolism that both saturates the representation of femininity and

provides a source of critique. For example, in the work of modernist artists and

writers, boredom provided a response to their position in society, a reflective “restless

self-consciousness (a desire to desire)” (93). Moreover, as Petro notes, much feminist

work over the past decades has involved “an aesthetics as well as a phenomenology of

boredom: a temporality of duration, relentless in its repetition, and a stance of active

waiting, which, at least in their feminist formulations, allow for redefinition,

resistance, and change” (93). The notion of duration, repetition and active waiting are

unmistakable elements of Coppola’s oeuvre. Looking at her cinema in this way opens

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a door to viewing Coppola’s practice as not outside, but entrenched in a continuum of

women’s cultural production.

Perhaps the most well known example to render female subjectivity through a

focus on repetition, banality and ennui is Belgian filmmaker, Chantal Akerman’s

1975 film, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. An experimental

film, Jeanne Dielman focuses on the domestic existence of one woman, a single

mother, as she goes about a daily routine, including her regular sex work, servicing

clients in her home. The film emphasizes duration, fixing, for extended periods, on

the monotonous tasks of daily life, such as peeling potatoes. At 201 minutes long, the

film demands that the spectator contemplate and enter into the alternative temporality

of the film. It concludes with the Dielman murdering one of her female characters.

The focus on gesture, repetition and domesticity suggests not only tedium, but also

isolation and alienation as gendered experience. While the work of Akerman and

Coppola differ in many ways, Coppola’s characters and her pacing of narrative, such

as that in Lost in Translation, similarly emphasise stillness, alienation and the texture

of time passing. As a key example of the exploration of technologies of gender Jeanne

Dielman offers an important point of reference in terms of locating Coppola’s practice

within a film historical tradition.

Here, loneliness and isolation accompanies waiting. Also comparing

Coppola’s oeuvre to Jeanne Dielman, Sharon Lin Tay, in one of the few scholarly

discussions of Coppola’s work, focuses on this isolation and loneliness. For Tay this

isolation in “gilded cages” (the hotel, the palace, the girls’ bedroom in the family

home), cloisters women. They ultimately find no way of realizing ennui as an avenue

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of transformation, with two of the films concluding with the death of the female

characters. The characters in Marie Antoinette and The Virgin Suicides

remain in their cages and march respectively towards their tragic ends, much in

the same ways as Jeanne Dielman, and thereby revise Virginia Woolf’s

reflections on the need for a room of ones own: while space for thought and

creativity is imperative, one needs to emerge for air, society and engagement. [.

. .] Therefore, Coppola’s oeuvre may be seen to be critiquing the implicit lack

of female participation outside of these women’s rooms. (134)

Rather than failing on feminist terms, Tay argues that the films critique isolation and,

by inference, second wave feminism’s preoccupation with the personal realm.

There is a further critique operating through Coppola’s women, one that takes

up a feminist ennui but poses it in relation to an unresolved critique. In this respect,

ennui and isolation, and the desire to desire, must be understood not in the purely

modernist frame that Petro and Tay propose, but in light, of the contemporary

imperatives of postfeminism. If, as I have noted, a post-feminist sensibility rejects a

collective gender politics, emphasises individual aspiration and, as Gill notes, is

closely associated with shifts towards neo-liberalism, it also has cemented a place in

popular culture for the active desiring female subject. This has become a gendered

inflection of the entrepreneurial self. Coppola’s women offer an image that is both

entrenched in and critiques the sensibility of postfeminism. They exhibit a knowing

attitude to the context in which they find themselves while being strongly

individualised. Moreover these female subjects demonstrate various attachments to

material culture and, thus, reflect the way Coppola’s films more broadly benefit from

strong associations with fashion, music (records in the case of The Virgin Suicides)

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and careful set design. These women have been endowed with a post-feminist

capacity for purpose and aspiration and yet this is not sufficient. They are plagued by

a lack of life direction as well as moral and existential uncertainty that manifests as

boredom. This is a response that occurs either because of or in spite of the choices

that are open to them. In this respect they display modernist responses to a post-

feminist lifeworld. The crisis here pertains to the absence of a desired object when

desire becomes almost an imperative.

Reading Coppola, the director, as a brand and the reception of this figuration,

offers an understanding of the unique niche she occupies as a woman in Hollywood. I

have also suggested that there are certain contradictions and ambivalences that

accompany this brand. Her films are concerned with the inner life of women rather

than their social position and this, perhaps, fuels the critiques of her work that

characterize it as girlish and insubstantial. At worst, her features are represented as the

whimsical musings of an over-privileged female adolescent.18 Neither this perceived

distance from gender politics, nor this over identification with feminized qualities

account for Coppola’s oeuvre as one concerned with a female existentialism or a

feminist tradition, with “a phenomenology of boredom” that, albeit in unresolved

ways, responds to post-feminist sensibilities.

The grouping of critics who are sharply censorious of Coppola’s cinema

features few female commentators. These critiques do not locate the films within the

field of feminist debate---they are much more concerned with the problem of class

and taste determinants. As the most successful female director in the contemporary

domain of independent American cinema, Coppola exemplifies the difficult balance

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between bourgeois and bohemian taste formations that is key to the marketability of

this cinema. In part, it is the affluence of her narratives, their languid meditation on

the lives of those who seem to take for granted their advantage, that evoke questions

around the relevance of Coppola’s work. This questionability is doubled (and

personalized) when coupled with Coppola’s own femininity and privilege. The

ostensible problem or difficulty here is not with gender per se, but with high

bourgeois femininity. Her cinema and her brand is deemed, by some, to be unworthy

because it is too whimsical, too effortless, too much the product of an un-validated

access to power.

Coppola as a director brand succeeds on the terms of style, taste and judgment,

particularly with regard to the filmic production of mood, tone and imagery. Although

these are attributes that could easily be negatively feminized, in appraisals of

Coppola’s work this is seldom the case. In this respect, she is offered the credibility of

the sub-cultural fringe and its aesthetic economy, an important achievement in

independent Hollywood. Yet her brand offers something exceptional to the Indiewood

terrain and to conceptualizations of women’s authorship. If, as I have argued, her

personal image is frequently bound to her plots and characters, all of these exhibit a

seemingly paradoxical mix of self-actualisation and a lack of concern, a “coolness.”

This aura enables her popularity and success within independent Hollywood in a way

that sits alongside a masculine autuerism that blends sub-cultural cool and art house

aesthetics. This cultural capital and seeming effortlessness, moreover, diverges from

the established image of the female director of mainstream cinema, updating this

image in ways that align more easily with the entrepreneurialism and consumerism of

postfeminism. Yet, there is also an uneasy fit here as Coppola’s interest in themes and

25  

questions that follow the European modernism of Ackerman or Antonioni, seek out a

deeper understanding of female experience. While these contradictions contribute to

an ambivalent auteur brand for Coppola, they also add to her success and distinction,

constituting a singularly unique figuration of the new female director in contemporary

cinema.

Bibliography

Ashby, Justine. “Postfeminism in the British Frame.” Cinema Journal 44:2 (2005):

127-135.

Betts, Kate. “Sofia’s Choice.” Time. 162.11 (2003): 70-72.

Biskind, Peter. Down and Dirty Pictures: Mirimax, Sundance, and the Rise of

Independent Film. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004.

Chatman, Seymour. Antonioni, or, the Surface of the World. Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1985.

Cook, Pam and Mieke Bernink. The Cinema Book. London: British Film Institute,

1999.

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--. Portrait of a Lady: Sofia Coppola.” Sight & Sound. 16.11 (2006): 36-40.

Ebert, Roger. “Somewhere: Lone Wolf of the Chateau.” Chicago Sun-Times. 21 Dec.

2010: n. pag. Web 19 May 2011.

Gill, Rosalind. “Postfemnist Media Culture: Elements of a Sensibility.” European

Journal of Cultural Studies 10:2 (2007): 147-166.

Grant, Catherine. “Secret Agents: Feminist Theories of Women’s Film Authorship.”

Feminist Theory 2:1 (2001): 113-130.

Gledhill, Christine. “Images and Voices: Approaches to Marxist Feminist Criticism.”

Multiple Voices in Feminist Film Criticism. Diane Carson et al. (eds.) Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press, 1994. 109-123.

Haslem, Wendy. “Neon Gothic: Lost in Translation.” Senses of Cinema. 31 (2004): n.

pag. Web. 21 Oct. 2010.

Holmlund, Chris. “Postfeminism from A to G.” Cinema Journal 44:2 (2005): 116-

121.

Jenkins, David. “Somewhere.” Time Out 1-7 Sept. 2010: n. pag. Web. 02 Nov. 2010.

Kennedy, Todd. “Off with Hollywood's Head: Sofia Coppola as Feminine Auteur.”

Film Criticism 35:1 (2010): 37-59.

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King, Geoff. Indiewood, USA. London: I.B. Tauris & Co., 2009.

---. Lost in Translation. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010.

Kleinhans, Chuck. “Independent Features: Hopes and Dreams.” The New American

Cinema. Jon Lewis (ed.). Durham: Duke University Press, 1998. 307-327.

Lane, Christina. Feminist Hollywood: From Born in Flames to Point Break. Detroit:

Wayne State University Press, 2000.

--. “Just Another Girl Outside the Neo-Indie.” Contemporary American Independent

Film. Chris Holmlund and Justin Wyatt (eds.). London: Routledge, 2005. 193-210.

Mayne, Judith. Claire Denis. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005.  

 

Mayshark, Jesse Fox. Post-Pop Cinema: The Search for Meaning in New American

Film. Westport: Praeger, 2007.  

McCarthy, Todd. “Somewhere.” Indiewire 4 Sept. 2010: n. pag. Web. 28 Nov. 2010.

McRobbie, Angela. “Post-Feminism and Popular Culture.” Feminist Media Studies

4:3 (2004): 255-264.

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Mottram, James. The Sundance Kids: How the Mavericks Took Back Hollywood.

London: Faber, 2006.

Nelson, Rob. “Let Them Eat Whatever.” Cinema Scope. 27 (2006): 80.

Olsen, Mark. “Tokyo Drifters.” Sight & Sound. 14.1 (2004): 12-6.

Peretz, Evgenia. “Something About Sofia.” Vanity Fair. 553 (2006): 352.

Petro, Patrice. Aftershocks of the New: Feminism and Film History. New Brunswick:

Rutgers University Press, 2002.

Polan, Dana. Jane Campion. London: British Film Institute, 2001.

Pride, Ray. “Pieces of Time: Chatting with Sofia Coppola.” Cinema Scope. 3 (2000):

15-8.

Rogers, Anna. “Sofia Coppola.” Senses of Cinema. 45 (2007): n. pag. Web. 13 Oct.

2010.  

Romney, Jonathan. “Somewhere.” The Independent. 12 Dec. 2010: n. pag. Web 19

May 2011.  

Schembri Jim. “Boxing Day Film Guide.” The Age. 28 Dec. 2010: n. pag. Web 19

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Sconce, Jeffrey. “Irony, Nihilism and the New American ‘Smart’ Film.” Screen 43: 4

(2002): 349-369.

Tay, Sharon Lin. Women on the Edge: Twelve Political Film Practices. New York:

Palgrave MacMillan, 2009.

Taylor, Ella. “Sofia Coppola Talks to Ella Taylor.” The Guardian. 13 Oct. 2003. n

pag. Web. 29 Oct. 2010.

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                                                                                                               1  See Jonathan Romney or Roger Ebert’s review for an example of this. 2 See Betts, Taylor or Peretz for commentaries that explore Coppola’s dilettante image. 3 Perhaps the most intense criticisms were leveled after the release of Marie Antoinette. For

example, this film was booed by a small section of the audience at Cannes and in a report of

the press conference held after the screening Robert Nelson writes, “The French revolutionary

film reporters joined an international coalition that seemed bent on collecting the head of

Sofia Coppola” (80). Nelson’s piece consistently equates Coppola with Antoinette and with

aristocracy and the press with the revolutionary masses. At one point he notes that Coppola

looks “beseechingly” at her star, Kirsten Dunst, in a manner “that seems in the context of this

conspicuously consumptive movie to say, “can we go shopping now?” (80). 4  In this respect, bourgeois taste is not interpreted through the nihilistic, blank style of what

Jeffrey Sconce, in 2002, referred to as “new American ‘smart’ film”. The body of films

30  

                                                                                                               Sconce refers to in his well-known article would have screened alongside Coppola’s earlier

films in multiplexes and vied for the same audience. 5 I borrow this point from Christine Gledhill who elaborates on this as a “feminist orbit”

(121). 6 See Tay, Cook (“Portrait”), Kennedy and Rogers. 7 Todd Kennedy’s article, “Off with Hollywood's Head: Sofia Coppola as Feminine Auteur”

In Film Criticism describes Coppola’s mixed reception in similar ways, citing a number of

reviews of Marie Antoinette in particular. 8 Cook also argues, “one should try to take account of the different conditions of possibility

for creative claims” (314). These conditions include the vastly different access to power and

opportunity experienced by women in the Hollywood hierarchy. 9 See Mottram, p. 247, for more discussion of this point. 10 While only 16 years old, Dunst had already achieved prominence in Hollywood after being

cast, along with Tom Cruise, in Interview with a Vampire (1994). 11 Women are overrepresented in the television industry. Although they frequently find this

sphere to be a springboard for feature film production, as Lane notes, women also find

themselves returning to television after directing features as a compromise and when they can

no longer find work in Hollywood (Feminist 229). As she also notes, in the era of HBO and

quality television, despite the additional cache and creative freedom offered by cable

networks that many female directors enjoy, there is a danger that the “girl ghetto” of

television might be reinforced rather than challenged by the number who find themselves

producing quality television (“Just Another” 200). 12 Here I draw on Christina Lane (“Just Another”) who describes this industrial support for

women filmmakers at this time. 13 See Kleinhans for a mapping of the historical definition of this sphere. 14 See Peter Biskind for a fuller discussion of the shifting commercial relationship between

Hollywood and Independent film. 15 In addition to Francis Ford Coppola, these directors include George Lucas, Steven

Spielberg, Martin Scorcese, Brain De Palma, Stanley Kubrick, Terrence Malick, Jonathan

Demme and Robert Altman. 16 See Ashby, Holmlund, Whelehan, Gill or McRobbie for a fuller discussion of

postfeminism. 17 Here Petro is referring to all kinds of ennui, including that which accompanies the boredom

of domestic labour and the repetition of women’s work that is not bestowed the same rewards

and achievements as labour in the public sphere. She is also referring, in a more abstract

31  

                                                                                                               sense, to the experience of waiting for political change (change that effects women’s lives)

and the slowness of this change. 18 This is especially evident in Nelson’s piece on the reception of Marie Antoinette at Cannes.