Developing a unique and original style within artistic mediums in modern society is extremely difficult. Not only do Hollywood’s strict and sheltered formulas often reject these emerging creations, but there are often critiques upon these innovative aspirants that there pieces are simply re-workings, as nothing is really original anymore. One individual who has gained high acclaim for her stylistic and authentic films is Sofia Coppola. As a debut, The Virgin Suicides, was an art-house success and her following films, specifically Lost in Translation and Marie Antoinette, too captured her now distinguishable and defined themes and auterial style.

 

(Sofia Coppola)

Born in 1971 as the daughter of the acclaimed Godfather trilogy director, Francis Ford Coppola, Sofia Coppola was to presumably follow in her father’s footsteps (Halasz, Judith R 2011). Despite her best efforts in studying fashion and photography, Coppola was drawn to screenwriting and cinema (Biography.com 2014). From her debut, The Virgin Suicides (1999) to her most recent piece, The Bling Ring (2013), she has secured a distinguishable method for her style of characters, storyline, themes and narrative progression. Developing an art-house anodyne to Hollywood’s formulaic speed and rage through each of her works, Sofia Coppola has managed great success as a screenwriter-director. Additionally, she has made way for emerging females in artistic industries. She has, justly, been labelled one of the first female auteurs of the modern era (Prince, Richard 2013). The ‘auteur theory’ is gradually emerging once more after a period of being a “muddied” and male-dominated term. Essentially, the definition of an auteur is a director who can be labelled more accurately as an author and the major creative force of the piece by delving deeper into the visual cinematic and auditory elements rather than the plot line (Auteur Theory 2014). In recent years, a number of women, including Jane Campion, Kathryn Bigelow and Sofia Coppola have successfully gained recognition and acclaim – which in turn has commenced the recreation of the originally chauvinistic ‘auteur’ idiom (Shone, Tom 2012).

 

Coppola’s first feature film, The Virgin Suicides, is based on Jeffrey Eugenides 1993 novel of the same name and despite being her debut film, this haunting art-house piece gained her immediate success and acclaim (Morgan, Riona 2011). Told from the perspective of four neighbourhood boys, The Virgin Suicides reflects on the boys’ obsession with five teenage sisters who all committed suicide 25 years ago in mid-70s Michigan. The Lisbon sisters [Cecilia (13), Lux (14), Bonnie (15), Mary (16), and Therese (17)] are heavenly creatures to the boys; all with flowing blonde hair, bright eyes, porcelain skin and angelic auras. Interestingly, this method of storytelling manipulates the audience’s lack of understanding for the girls’ final actions also – we too see them as predominantly beautiful and divine beings with no real motivations or reasoning for their suicides. In fact, the boys conclude the Lisbon sisters’ suicides as “selfish acts from which they have never been able to recover”.  Their strict religious living conditions are almost a secondary plot point. Despite the girls being exorbitantly taken out of school for one of them returning home late and the already existing suicide of the youngest girl, the boys’ descriptions and accounts still only manage superficiality. The Virgin Suicides focuses on purity and wholesomeness as its holy grail; the fact that the girls all died was almost insignificant compared to their image as ephemeral creatures of light; the fact that all the boys wanted them was more important than their exile from their community. Both the original novel and the film tackle the themes of the American obsession with happiness, the transience of memory, the subtle homogeneity of tragedy, and the complexity of religion intermingling with adolescence and sexuality. However, Coppola has made emptiness and the ability to be almost formless guilefully desirable – which positively contrasts from the novel.

 

Sofia Coppola’s two most important auterial characteristics are her impressive facility to capture ephemera and the method in which she embraces her earmarked themes of loneliness, dreams and ambitions, finding purpose and dysphoria (Thompson, Maria 2013). As a story about the intrinsic nostalgia for the loss of adolescence, The Virgin Suicides establishes Coppola’s common theme of capturing a sense of emptiness through five unattainable teenage girls who are the quintessence of burgeoning femininity(Chang, Chris 2000). Recreating the wood-panelled basement side of 70s America and the elusive blend of the capriciousness and melancholy of adolescence – Coppola really does capture the reality of the time when suburban living had reached its debauched peak (Olsen, Mark 2000). Like the boys’ description of the Lisbon sisters – it was a time of “oddly shaped emptiness” (Eugenides, Jeffrey 1993, 248) that was simply characterised by what surrounded them; hence, the superficiality of the exultant 70s lifestyle that we remember through disco pants and bowl-cuts, was essentially a façade for the deprecating existence bursting with a number of failing industries.

 (Lux (Kirsten Duns) of the Virgin Suicides (1999)).

‘The Virgin Suicides’ is not only a literal title, but one for metaphorical purposes. The fact that the girls all ultimately committed suicide was insignificant compared to the emptiness and nonphysical death they all faced at some point within the film – most notably Lux as she laid derelict and abandoned on the football field after their school prom. This concept not only separates Sofia Coppola from Hollywood’s formulaic and safeguarded models but reveals an intrinsic aptitude to encapsulate intense and controversial subject matter in original and innovative lights. Furthermore, Coppola’s cinematographic style and use of mise-en-scene within this debut, and following films, incorporates additional European-style qualities. Her documentary-style aesthetics through use of wandering and edgy cinematography, liminal images and dead-time, reflects her preference to show the crises and liminal moments, rather than tell them (Quincey, Vanessa n.d.). Once more, these predilections and tendencies further authenticate her distinct auterial style.

(Bob Harris (Bill Murray) and Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) in Lost in Translation (2003)).

The majority of Coppola’s films deal with protagonists, generally female, that have issues with forming meaningful connections and are facing a clash of societal expectations and personal ambitions (Thompson, Maria 2013). She utilises simple plot lines to allow the audience to focus integrally on the relationship between the characters and their environment and the subtle yet contentious themes. As can be identified in two of her other successful films, Lost in Translation (2003) and Marie Antoinette (2006), a female protagonist at a pivotal turning point in their life is inaugurated. Lost in Translation follows the emotional swells of neglected and youthful Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) drifting around Tokyo and her apartment with washed-up celebrity Bob Harris (Bill Murray), with no real sense of direction or purpose (Prince, Richard 2013; Ott and Keeling 2010). Comparatively, Marie Antoinette explores the short life of France’s iconic yet ill-fated queen, Marie Antoinette (Kirsten Dunst) from her marriage at 15 years old to Louis XVI to the end of her reign, and ultimately the fall of Versailles, a few short years later (Hoberman, J 2006). Both films explore that earmarked emptiness, loneliness and disorientation however plunge into diverging universal affairs. Lost in Translation furtherinvestigates the untranslatable disposition of linguistic or cultural excess (McGowan, Todd 2007) and Marie Antoinette, fights the cobwebs of history to biographically examine the poisoned relationships held by the French queen, and the political maelstrom she was coerced into the eye of (Honeycutt, Kirk 2006). However, Coppola accomplishes all of these voyeuristically and with distinguishable mise-en-scene, especially in Marie Antoinette wherethe candy-coloured sets and extreme space left in the shots emanates innocence yet extreme isolation. Additionally, Coppola’s preference for indefinite conclusions converges powerfully with traditional European filmmakers who have favoured the inchoate reality rather than the tidy and fabricated Hollywood finales (Quincey, Vanessa n.d.). The emotional passivity established within both of these films adheres with Coppola’s debut film, and all of these unique forms of authorship further verify Coppola as an auteur.

Conclusively, Sofia Coppola has managed remarkable success and gained high acclaim for her undoubtedly unique and original pieces, including The Virgin Suicides, Lost in Translation and Marie Antoinette. Through her innate ability to capture the sensations of desolation, solitude and transience through generally female protagonists and controversial themes – she has rightfully been established as one of the leading female auteurs of the modern day.

 

References

Abeille, Su. 2013. “The Death of Purity – The Virgin Suicides”. Suicide Blonde – WordPress Blog, July 14. Accessed May 11, 2014. http://suicideblondisms.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/the-death-of-purity-the-virgin-suicides-analyzed-by-suicide-blonde/

Chang, Chris. 2000. “The Virgin Suicides”. Film Comment 36 (2): 73-75. Accessed May 15, 2014. http://search.proquest.com.ezp01.library.qut.edu.au/docview/210267839/abstract?accountid=13380

“Auteur Theory”. 2014. In Encyclopaedia Britannica Online. Accessed May 20, 2014. http://www.britannica.com.ezp01.library.qut.edu.au/EBchecked/topic/44609/auteur-theory

Eugenides, Jeffrey. 1993. The Virgin Suicides. United States: Farrar, Straus and Giroux Publishing.

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