Sofia Coppola In The Gentlewomen

Sofia
Coppola

The unashamedly feminine filmmaking of Sofia Coppola

Text by Holly Brubach
Portraits Inez & Vinoodh
Styling by Jonathan Kaye

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Issue n° 15, Spring & Summer 2017

We think we can tell a Sofia Coppola film at a glance — all atmospheric long takes, winsome girls and pastel shades. But at 45, the Oscar-winning director and screenwriter is tackling a surprising new genre with her reimagining of 1971’s The Beguiled, a tense Civil War drama set in the American South, featuring Colin Farrell, Nicole Kidman and no small amount of gore. 

Poster / Sofia Coppola / Lost in Translation

Posters

LOST IN TRANSLATION

A Sofia Coppola Film

The Art Collection Of Sofia Coppola

The Art Collection Of Sofia Coppola

MARDI 7 OCTOBRE 2014
Sofia Coppola is a noted collector of art and photography and while it is unfortunate that we cannot survey her entire collection, I thought it might be fun to examine some of the highlights. A few of the exquisite pieces composing Sofia’s collection are "Sakura" by Risaku Suzuki, “Cold Beer Beautiful Girls” by Ed Ruscha, and “Nick (Poquatuck Park)” by Elizabeth Peyton. Additionally, Art + Auction reported that she had been seen buying art by Hugo Marki, Larry Rivers, and Anne-Laure Sacriste; Sofia also collects works by Juergen Teller and Helmut Newton among others.

“Hat + 5 Roses” by William Klein (1956)

Sofia Coppola explains the piece that first fueled her passion: "I began collecting fashion photography, encouraged by my mother. She gave me a William Klein photo of a woman smoking with roses on her hat, and another of a model on a Paris street. I still collect photos and art, and I love it. Some of my favorite pieces are by Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Richard Prince, Takashi Homma, Larry Sultan, Elizabeth Peyton. Just the other day I bought a Bob Richardson picture I love of a model on a beach with a tear in her eye."

"Sakura" by Risaku Suzuki (2002)

Cherry blossoms set the perfect mood for the bedroom of Sofia Coppola, a beautiful symbol of the balance between strength and fragility. Japanese for cherry blossoms, "Sakura" is the photograph by Risaku Suzuki underneath which Sofia falls asleep. Sofia recalls her introduction to the work vividly: "I discovered Risaku Suzuki via my friend who works at Tokyo's Hysteric Glamour, a fashion boutique that also publishes art books. I fell in love with his cherry blossom photographs and recently ordered a print for my apartment." Born in 1963 in Japan, Risaku Suzuki earned his degree at the Tokyo College of Photography.

“Nick (Poquatuck Park)” by Elizabeth Peyton (2003)

The painting "Nick (Poquatuck Park)" by Elizabeth Peyton can be seen here in two different settings… First, we see the work mounted above the French dining table in Sofia Coppola's SoHo loft. Then after moving house in Manhattan, Sofia chose to hang her Peyton painting above the sofa; it can be spotted behind the shoulder of her cousin-in-law, Amanda Blake. Elizabeth Peyton was born in Danbury, Connecticut in 1965 and studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. The artist focuses on small-scale portraits and prefers working with those she considers friends or intimates.

"Cold Beer Beautiful Girls" by Ed Ruscha (1993)

In Sofia Coppola's Somewhere, a print by Ed Ruscha titled "Cold Beer Beautiful Girls" leans against the wall of the room at Chateau Marmont as part of the set, casually abandoned by Johnny Marco and perfectly symbolizing his nonchalance and arrogance; he can't be bothered to hang it — like so much of his life it is simply there. I loved this touch, having read that Sofia considers Ed Ruscha her favorite artist. Intriguingly, it was actually Stephen Dorff that suggested this perfect prop, as we learn in an exchange between him and Sofia for Interview: "So I met Ed (Ruscha) again at one of his shows at Larry Gagosian’s gallery, and I was at his studio randomly when I had gotten back from Paris. I was excited about getting the part (in Somewhere), but I couldn’t really tell anybody, because we were kind of a few months from shooting and we didn’t really want it everywhere. So I didn’t really tell many people, but at Ed’s studio, I did leak it to him. He said, 'What’s been going on?' So I told him, 'I’ve just come back from this incredible trip to Paris and I think I got the role of my lifetime so far.' So then I was walking around the studio as he was finishing up some business and I saw that he was working on a smaller painting called 'Cold Beer Beautiful Girls.' He was working on the prints for it, doing his artist proof and touching things up. So I was like, 'What’s this, Ed?' He’s like, 'Oh, that’s just some work. I’m doing a very limited number of prints.' So I said, 'Oh, wow. You know, it’s so weird, but I think Sofia is a fan of yours and she has this great picture. You know the Dennis Hopper one?' And he’s like, 'Oh, really?' And I said, 'Yeah. She has it in her Paris apartment and we were talking about you a little bit when I was over there, and it’s just weird to be here now and then to see this picture. I think this would be really cool as set dressing in his hotel room — you know, like the character went out and bought it?' Just hanging there…" So it was… Certainly Sofia Coppola was glad the character went out and bought the limited-edition print that now graces her office, "I’m happy I have that Ed Ruscha print from our movie. I love when you get to get something by someone that you love."

I WANT TO BE A COPPOLA

The relevent world of Sofia Coppola

Sofia Coppola
by María Herreros

The relevant world of Sofia Coppola.

Kranari
January 21, 2011

Some could say that the more films you make, the more experience you acquire, the better a director you become.Seems to me like this rule does not apply to Sofia Coppola. Despite having been raised surrounded by art and cinema (both parents seem to have offered her a rich artistic environment to grow up in), Coppola has always been a woman born to direct. A very attractive quality, to be able to know exactly what you want in a film and how you want it to look. I find it amusing that when finishing her formal education she found herself in crisis over what to do for a living. She decided to try different avenues of expression, one after the other failed to fulfill her.

BEHIND THE LENSE

property of Annie Leibovitz

Coppola intrigues me as a person. Her movies on the one hand, always captivate audiences for their rich visual component and their unique style. She is without a doubt one of the very few artists of her generation that uses words so slightly yet manipulates sets, lights and camera and brings out their full potential. As a person however she seems demure, understated and shy. I was reading an article this past week -as I mentioned in Thursday for Thought– on her in BUST magazine and it captured my attention without letting on too much. It doesn’t surprise me that like her films, her private life remains private, while her creative process is an open book for her readers to discover freely.

property of W magazine

So under the simple, subdued exterior, lies a person and an artist that is decisive, creative and potent. She also seems to fill a gap in today’s market for stylized films that utilize the visual component in order to transmit their unique message. I always look forward to her next film and will always watch in hope of learning new things about how she views the world. Because I’ve come to discover that the world according to Sofia Coppola is a multi-layered and thought provoking.

CUETHEARTIST

The Sofia Coppola Touch / The Beguiled

PHOTOGRAPHY BY OLIVIA BEE REPRESENTED BY ICONOCLAST IMAGE SHOT AT THE STANDARD HIGHLINE

The Sofia Coppola Touch

With 'The Beguiled,' Sofia Coppola continues to assemble a rhapsodic filmography.

by BILGE EBIRI
JUNE 28, 2017

We all have some idea of what the Sofia Coppola Style is like: dreamy, delicate, bathed in melancholy pop. But think of how different the plangent lyricism of The Virgin Suicides is from the digitized, fame-obsessed frenzy of The Bling Ring. Or the austere long takes of Somewhere from the gloriously colorful postpunk cacophony of Marie Antoinette.

Sofia Coppola / Somewhere

Sofia Coppola

Is That It?

by ALEX CARNEVALE

Somewhere

dir. Sofia Coppola

98 minutes

Were you possibly among the many millions of people dying to hear another story about a jaded rich guy living in Los Angeles who reinvents himself due to the presence of his wonderful young daughter? You are in luck. Star actor Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff, in the 101st role he was not at all suited to play) has clearly never seen Californication, because it is loosely based on his life. Does every single man in Hollywood go around half-shaven, divorced, with a daughter of the same age (Dakota's younger sister Elle Fanning)? The answer is yes, and it is a relief.

Somewhere, which gets its U.S. release today, is Sofia Coppola's latest film, on the heels of the tragically boring Marie Antoinette. No one who has to work for a living could possibly feel sympathetic for the tribulations of an actor who lives on hotel room service, and no one who paid to see this film could possibly walk away feeling anything but pity for its creator and disgust for its hero. The drudgery of Johnny Marco having to watch twin strippers in his bedroom is only exceeded by the cruel vicissitudes of being a popular Hollywood star. If having a daughter makes people so warm and appealing, how come Harvey Weinstein has three and he's still a complete piece of shit?

Somewhere not only has the worst title of any movie this year, it also takes itself more seriously than Inception, which many scientists believed was impossible. Most grating about Coppola's directorial style is her obsession with long takes. Granted, extended periods without rapid cuts and reverse angles distinguish her films from say, Hawaii Five-0. But really, her exhausted Los Angeles scapes aren't visually stimulating enough to be engaging; images like those of Dorff's daughter figure skating on an open rink and Dorff's head ensconced in a foam mask for his new movie only pretend to be novel. We've seen these places before — nothing about the locales is exciting or unfamiliar.

Once Johnny Marco almost chases a woman back to her house after making eye contact at a stoplight, but when he gets to her gate and it closes on him, he drives home. For the briefest of moments we feel something like excitement, but then we retreat to the next long take. Quentin Tarantino and Catherine Breillat can get away with two minute takes because at the end of their scenes, Jews flee the Nazis or Caroline Ducey has sex.

Somewhere follows the basic cinematic outline of all such father-daughter partnerships. In the real world, teen girls are a thousand times more intelligent than their parents, operate high level machinery and text at a PhD level. In Coppola's world, they retain the innocence of Anna Paquin in The Piano. It's impossible to watch this film and not think about Katie Holmes, what with the masculine, half-shaven man-boy's total lack of concern for how his treatment of women might influence his daughter or anyone he cares about. Johnny Marco is such a misogynist that he makes his daughter's mother abandon them both, which is just about the cheapest trick in the screenwriting book, right after killing your main character's trusty german shepherd (Michael J. Fox).

All the serious misogynists that I have had the good fortune to encounter are unabashed and unapologetic. Only a truly deluded person could create the so-rare-it-doesn't-exist-in-the-wild empathetic womanizer. In the real world, there's no such delicate balance between sensitivity and insensitivity in one male body. When Ryan Reynolds was politely let go by Scarlett Johansson, he whined to his friends about her lack of effort in their marriage. Hasn't Sofia Coppola read Men in Revolt? The most masculine person in the world is Mr. Rogers, and he passed some time ago. Every other man in the world is more reminiscent of Carrie Bradshaw if he dyed his hair brunette.

One morning Johnny wakes up for breakfast in Milan and both his daughter and his one-night stand are looking at him with the same expectant eyes. It's the kind of absurdly simple joke Coppola loves to play — every irony pretends to be new, as if she had recently discovered hypocrisy for the first time in recorded history and wanted to share it with everyone. Dorff's face, while far too inexpressive to ever make him anything more than a slightly classier Christian Slater, begs us to become sufficiently disgusted by how famous people are treated. On a scale of relevant or important lessons, this ranks somewhere between "don't put your hand in dog shit" and "being white is pretty hard."

In her most vacuous film, Lost in Translation, Coppola managed to make some people feel sorry for two of the least sympathetic people in the world. The fact that it is even worked at all is a credit to how effective she can be at convincing you the most uninteresting monsters are partly human. But we have a different attitude towards waste and excess than we did in 2003. Back then we could watch the husk that used to be the actor known as Bill Murray make vaguely racist comments about Japanese people for no reason and applaud afterwards. Maybe for the international audience this was like watching the National Geographic Channel. I really don't know, I am pretty sure even they think Twilight jokes and playing "I'll Try Anything Once" over a guy swimming with his daughter in a pool are overdone.

One of William Goldman's best ever essays was about why most plays were about putting on a play. He didn't have to account for the poverty of ideas that led to Broadway about Broadway, because it was obvious — people who spent their entire lives in theater naturally had no other life experience to draw on. Somerset Maugham's edict to write what you know is among the dumbest pieces of advice ever given about writing, and it has recently become more harmful than even he realized. The maxim of 'write what you know' is revolting self-help propaganda: you're good enough, you don't need to keep learning, your experience of the world is valid and complete in itself.

The number of possible life experiences is dwindling. Eventually we will all have one life experience, distinguishable only in small moments not accounted for by communal art. What draws divergent backgrounds into the Americam amalgam is the shared experience of life reflected in art, but the people who create this perception in the film medium are drastically limited by their own surroundings. The last thing you have to do is start making films about people markedly different from yourself, but the first thing you have to do is stop making films about people identical to yourself.

Here we have a life stretched generically over the same old surroundings. It is not simply the characters or the action or the sets or the dialogue that is so ubiquitous and familiar. It is the shots themselves — Stephen Dorff has looked in a mirror in every movie he has been in since 1995. The metaphor of a swimming pool is now a common sight in Tyler Perry sitcoms, let alone in films that purport to be taken seriously. The cliche of a man falling asleep while having sex was recently featured on an episode of Spongebob Squarepants. Wide angle views of cars driving down the Los Angeles freeway while subdued trance music plays in the background are about as entertaining as a colonoscopy.

The fact that Johnny Marco has a cast on his arm for most of Somewhere is so pedestrian a symbol I would expect it in some undergraduate's romance novel. The film's interminable 98 minutes roll on so uneventfully that outside of the occasional presence of Johnny Marco's cell phone and Guitar Hero, the entire plot might have taken place in 1970. The idea that this incredibly dull, prosaic movie won the Golden Lion (or as I call it,the Flying Aslan) in Venice is only slighter sadder than the possibility that Avatar made more money than the GNP of Michigan. (Thought: was the audience simply so relieved they didn't have to sit through Marie Antoinette that they gave her the award out of gratitude?)

The specter of Heath Ledger looms over the proceedings, since the resulting cinematic apologia resembles something like what a simplistic mind thinks when a father takes his own life through a combination of otherworldly excess and outright stupidity. Coppola's film is like looking at a squirrel that got run over by a car and vainly trying to bring the creature back to life with a screenplay. After Johnny Marco drops his daughter off for summer camp in a helicopter, our hero becomes uncontrollably sad, complaining, "I'm nothing." He moves out of his residence in the Chateau Marmont Hotel and leaves all his rich person gear behind. You see, wealthy and famous people believe they aren't the real heroes, they are just very close to the real heroes. They admit that their lives are essentially meaningless, and that the true pleasures can't be purchased by money, but as long as they have it, they don't really need it. They are so out of touch with reality they think a silly movie like this is reality.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He is a writer living in Manhattan. He tumbls here and twitters here. He last wrote in these pages about the life of Mary McCarthy.

http://thisrecording.com/today/2010/12/22/in-which-we-realize-we-hated-lost-in-translation-in-retrospe.html