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.

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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 Coppolas public image, including the style of her filmmaking. I focus on perspectives of Coppolas work, investigating how the directors 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. Coppolas 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 womens cinema, is frequently elided in discussions of her success and style. It is the question of Coppolas 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 werent 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 Coppolas success as a director, as demonstrated in Peretzs quote, while others characterize her cinema as an inferior version of a more worthy art cinema. Coppolas 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 Petertzs notion that they seem to be extensions of herself.

Dana Polan writes that a womans 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 womans 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 Coppolas 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, Coppolas 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 Coppolas public image. I also investigate how the emphasis on mise-en-scne 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 Coppolas particular admixture of biography and cinematic style (within the given industrial context), has lead to significant success and also to derision and reproach. Coppolas 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 womens cinema, is frequently elided in discussions of her success and style. It is the question of Coppolas 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 Coppolas Oeuvre The plots of Coppolas 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, Charlottes search for direction in Lost In Translation or a young brides 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 Coppolas 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. Coppolas 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 Coppolas 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 Deniss cinema is a cinema fully engaged with a complex world. (1-2) Maynes focus on perceptions of Deniss cinema reconciles the terms of surface and depth, image and complexity. She draws attention to these as multiple and interrelated facets of the French directors work. The aptness of this comparison with Deniss cinema demonstrates what many critics have observed; although they are firmly entrenched in the sphere of American cinema, Coppolas 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 Coppolas 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 its a toss-up as to whether the film is about vacuity or is simply vacuous itself. McCarthys criticism indicates one way in which critics in the popular press have deemed Coppolas 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 Coppolas, 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 Coppolas 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 Peretzs characterization above draws this alignment in the service of a favorable appraisal, such a personalization has also been used to describe Coppolas 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 fathers 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 designshe 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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Coppolas 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 dont want it to be like a job. Thats 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 dont 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 [Coppolas] 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 [. . .]. Jenkinss remark offers an example of how Coppolas 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 Coppolas affluence and bourgeois lifestyle is tied to the films 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 Coppolas 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 Coppolas 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 Coppolas 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 Coppolas 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 Coppolas 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. Coppolas 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 Coppolas filmsher style is ethereal, sometimes to the point of insubstantialitybut 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 Coppolas femininity and the surplus of class privilege discussed above. However, in this section I investigate the different dimensions of Coppolas 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 directors 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 womens 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 agenthood 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 womens 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, Coppolas films could easily appear to lack heft, to borrow Maysharks 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 fathers 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 Coppolas 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 fted 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: Theres guys in my generation who are trying to recreate that thing they thought was happening in the 1970slets have a filmmakers night and all hang out, trying to make themselves into the gang they thought those guys were. But I dont 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 safernobodys 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 erashe 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 directors 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 womans 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 postpunk music is consistently featured in her films. Coppolas 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 Coppolas 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 characters experience and perspective. Yet, because they are so focused on impressionistic representation, Coppolas 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. Coppolas 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), Coppolas films and her personal image locate her brand favorably within the status economy of independent cinemas aesthetic hierarchies.

As demonstrated by Taylors 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 fathers 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 Coppolas 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 womens 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 Coppolas 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 Coppolas films are effective in minimising feminist references, there is another way of framing her film practice that aligns it with traditions of womens 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 Coppolas 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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Coppolas 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 womens lives, and womens culture, historically.17 Womens 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 Coppolas oeuvre. Looking at her cinema in this way opens

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a door to viewing Coppolas practice as not outside, but entrenched in a continuum of womens cultural production.

Perhaps the most well known example to render female subjectivity through a focus on repetition, banality and ennui is Belgian filmmaker, Chantal Akermans 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, Coppolas 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 Coppolas practice within a film historical tradition.

Here, loneliness and isolation accompanies waiting. Also comparing Coppolas oeuvre to Jeanne Dielman, Sharon Lin Tay, in one of the few scholarly discussions of Coppolas 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 Woolfs 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, Coppolas oeuvre may be seen to be critiquing the implicit lack of female participation outside of these womens rooms. (134) Rather than failing on feminist terms, Tay argues that the films critique isolation and, by inference, second wave feminisms preoccupation with the personal realm.

There is a further critique operating through Coppolas 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. Coppolas 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 Coppolas 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 postfeminist 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 Coppolas 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 Coppolas 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 Coppolas work. This questionability is doubled (and personalized) when coupled with Coppolas 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 Coppolas 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 womens 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 Coppolas interest in themes and

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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. Sofias 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 Womens 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): 116121.

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 May 2011.

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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.

Whelehan, Imelda. Overloaded: Popular Culture and the Future of Feminism. London: Womens Press Ltd: 2000.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! "!See Jonathan Romney or Roger Eberts review for an example of this.
2 3

See Betts, Taylor or Peretz for commentaries that explore Coppolas dilettante image. 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). Nelsons 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).
#!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

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!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Sconce refers to in his well-known article would have screened alongside Coppolas 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 See Tay, Cook (Portrait), Kennedy and Rogers. Todd Kennedys article, Off with Hollywood's Head: Sofia Coppola as Feminine Auteur

(121).
6 7

In Film Criticism describes Coppolas 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. While only 16 years old, Dunst had already achieved prominence in Hollywood after being Women are overrepresented in the television industry. Although they frequently find this

10

cast, along with Tom Cruise, in Interview with a Vampire (1994).

11

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 See Kleinhans for a mapping of the historical definition of this sphere. See Peter Biskind for a fuller discussion of the shifting commercial relationship between In addition to Francis Ford Coppola, these directors include George Lucas, Steven

women filmmakers at this time.

13 14

Hollywood and Independent film.

15

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

postfeminism.
17

of domestic labour and the repetition of womens work that is not bestowed the same rewards and achievements as labour in the public sphere. She is also referring, in a more abstract

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!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
sense, to the experience of waiting for political change (change that effects womens lives) and the slowness of this change.
18

This is especially evident in Nelsons piece on the reception of Marie Antoinette at Cannes.

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