Mise en scene me tender

The Virgin Suicides (1999) 1.66:1, Lost in Translation (2003) 1.85:1, Marie Antoinette (2006) 1.85:1, Somewhere (2010) 1.85:1, The Bling Ring (2013) 1.85:1, The Beguiled (2017) 1.66:1

In Priscilla (2023, Sofia Coppola) 1.85:1, the inserts are better than the movie. But it totally works to its strength. In this film setting is everything. And Graceland is Versailles. But the inserts; period authentic jars of Noxzema, Chanel no. 5, mascara in one assorted on a bathroom counter; in another, an airplane ticket on Pan-Am; porcelain miniature figurines in another; this is the film. We even get a montage where it all culminates in this connecting notably Sofia Coppola's longtime passion for Polaroids and it clicking this is probably the time they were first introduced into the market. Coppola curates the details of the setting as would be featured in a magazine, or adorning a bedroom wall, or a scrapbook. It’s who she is. It’s her artistic identity. 
     And as in most of her movies, her perspective is that of a young woman embarking on something like a fairytale exploration of a world of decadence, fame, and idealized romance that upon proving illusory allow her to become empowered and glimpse the kind of wisdom wrought through hard-earned life experience. In Priscilla it’s all so gorgeously quaint. Priscilla is an object. She’s Elvis’ idealization of a teenbride who only exists to be there for him to cuddle when he’s lonely, dress up, make-up, and do her hairstyles how he wants, and keep her in a dollhouse—she’s his Barbie. And here’s where it begins to become apparent that in this dream of make-believe the princess is just any ordinary girl, which is to say she could be any ordinary girl. And in her own way, Coppola tells the story she wants and has the immensely talented aptitude to understand that it’s not her burden to tell this as a documentary. 
     Sofia Coppola cinematically builds Priscilla through ephemeral, poignant moments of contemplative melancholy. There’s never anything melodramatic about the way she treats the material. The hues are soft and diffuse, as is the atmos—mist instead of shadows. 
     Priscilla is also a film where the 60s pop songs become this kind of alchemy collage. But the original score is also this percussion-based lullaby xylophones, celesta, or something like I don’t know: bells, glass, chimes, music box pretty, delicate, and soft like everything else in the movie. 
     This film isn’t detached from the heart of its protagonist. Yet there does seem to be something indicative of a distance between the life she wanted (and we want for her) and the one she gets (and the version of it Coppola has made into a movie). Coppola is so confident in her perspective that the artifice of it knowingly depicts the world used to ultimately define the characters she’s created. And through this it is then a matter of familiarizing ourselves with the cold inescapable maze of what’s left out as key to these truthful renditions. And it does help that Priscilla throws in just enough details you probably aren’t familiar with or don’t see coming to make it that much more fun.

11/03/2023 AMC Madison Yards 8

Atlanta, GA

DCP

The Virgin Homicides

I've been seriously obsessed with Marie Antoinette (2006, Sofia Coppola) for a couple of years now, after picking up a French forced-subtitled Blu-ray at a record store. For years after that movie had come out I thought I'd never have any interest in it. But somehow I opened up to it and the music finally expressed so much that I'd become intoxicated with emotion.

I'm still hooked on Marie Antoionette's scenes with 80s new wave from the opening Devo, to Siouxsie and the Banshees, Bow Wow Wow, and especially New Order (I actually got into a New Order phase in '06 because of the Marie Antoinette trailer). That movie is constructed with nothing but emotion.

There is no music in The Beguiled (2017, Coppola). There is no color. In Civil War Virginia amid light bird chirping and not too distant mortar blasts, located in the woods, Miss Farnsworth's Seminary for Young Ladies is where the tautly paced Southern Gothic chamber drama The Beguiled occurs.

CORPORAL JOHN MCBURNEY (Colin Farrell) spends the first hour sharing the best of times with the little women. As McBurney's time is about to run out, it's time for him to decide if he's going to fuck Nicole Kidman, Kirsten Dunst, or Elle Fanning. The Beguiled is like The Three Little Pigs with McBurney poised to decide if he'll choose the older refined beauty who has shared a brandy with him one night; or, the romantic young woman whom he's connected with emotionally; or, the teen Baby Doll who's snuck away to come and made out with him one night and doesn't talk much.

The night all the ladies dress up and serve apple pie after dinner, with the fever pitch wanton allure of the 3 little women too impossible to resist, McBurney goes to bed with...

The last 25 minutes are an entirely different world. What has changed? Sex. The Beguiled is about how this isolated community of women are able to function before McBurney, and with him up until one of them has sex with him. And they will function after he is gone. That's the best part of the ending, it's like a reverse denouement.

Framed at 1.66 on 35mm with mostly static shots, The Beguiled is a classic Hollywood prestige costume picture with stars, full of sex, violence, and scintillating pulpy drama. Coppola's blond girl cult in the forest aesthetic proves one of her most charming longest-lasting strengths. And The Beguiled succeeds as one of Coppola's best experiments with art in film.

Kidman's MARTHA in black and white blouses and accents is so cool, and really so much in The Beguiled is intensely evoked without words. Like the moment Martha gives McBurney the spongebath and there's that 70s Warhol porn torso insert. Dunst as EDWINA when she has that private breakdown collapsing horny against the wall is bold. Elle's ALICIA is so awesome in the scene where she pops in and out of McBurney's bedroom with that curtsy Coppola inline-cuts to as she exits. But really all three of the lead actresses do so much and bring so much to The Beguiled.

Maybe it's cause this is my kind of subject matter. Maybe it's because it's a woman's picture. Maybe it's because I love Sofia Coppola. But The Beguiled may be the most satisfying Hollywood movie I've seen so far 2017.

The 5th Film by Sofia Coppola

One thing Sofia Coppola has going for her is that her entire oeuvre displays a directorial authorship and she has written all of her films. Her motifs include a sense of isolation refracted through a protagonist's femininity, celebrity, or adolescence--sometimes all three. She also has a precious hand at art direction, with iconography and milieus often involving a noticeably girly insight into a delicately hand-decorated stylization.

However, her films exhibit an anemic quality that I imagine resembles what Coppola is like in real life. From what I've heard of her public speaking persona, she often mumbles, appears fatigued, and languidly struggles to make her points (I wonder if she's always like that? Her father, Francis Ford Coppola, seems incapable of ever shutting up.).

So, as an American female filmmaker of personal and original works, she has no peers. The only other American female voice I can think of in cinema to point out currently is screenwriter Diablo Cody. These two women maintain a literary consistency to their work that is responsible, without sacrificing the quality of the entertainment.

Did anyone see the alternate design Spring Breakers (2012, Harmony Korine) poster that this ad resembles? It's no shocker that advertisers would try to piggyback onto a market trend. Yet, The Bling Ring (2013, Sofia Coppola) is an entity that's saturated with themes of imitation, impostors, and moral and intellectual wastoids. Since The Bling Ring operate as criminals who are obsessed with looking good and getting rich by assimilating with and robbing those who already are good looking and rich, they are following the newest trend this summer, as evinced by Spring Breakers or Pain and Gain (2013, Michael Bay).

There are no characters or character development. All members of the Bling Ring Five serve a single function--they steal. That's it. We're introduced to them as a gang of thieves who seek high price-tagged luxury goods, they succeed, and they are punished. The plot archs, but the characters do not. This works because it fits the world of the story. I don't want more character here because it's depicting shallow teenagers who are looking for something that they don't know themselves--fun--and don't know it 'til they find it.

This feels like Coppola's adaptation of the video game Grand Theft Auto. The bulk of the film is a pass into the proceedings for the sake of fun, as opposed to a glimpse into the procedural of why and how they did it and why and how they got caught. Go read Crime and Punishment if you really care about heftier literary crime narratives that pathologize burglary.

The familiar structure of inserting mock interview footage of the culprits after they've been convicted of their crime amidst flashbacks of the crimes themselves seems like a new direction for Coppola, but it is similar to the structure used in The Virgin Suicides (1999, Coppola).

After The Virgin Suicides, Gus Van Sant would spend the '00s churning out his "Beautiful Corpse Trilogy," Gerry (2002), Elephant (2004), and Last Days (2005). Van Sant and Coppola have a lot in common. If Van Sant's trilogy can be said to have followed The Virgin Suicides, Coppola definitely seems to have returned the homage. Coppola hired DP Harris Savides (who shot all of Van Sant's trilogy) to shoot her 2010 film Somewhere, and The Bling Ring was his final film. By itself, this is weak evidence, but the pacing of Somewhere was glacial and the point of view in general feels more detached.

Savides' look is desaturated. There are no strong blacks or whites. He doesn't light for subjects, so actors often walk through areas of the set where they fall off into shadows. And this obviously stands out against the complete opposite look of Spring Breakers.

The production design is the star of this movie. We get the cool Coppola teen girl bedrooms, although the mansions are superbly evoked. It's almost like we're back in her 18th century Versailles.

The music is every bit as legit as it should be since we're supposed to feel like we are hanging out with the coolest kids in America. The culture of singing in one's car is also an astute addition.

While I did say there was no character, I'd like to close with one final Van Sant analogy. Nicky (Emma Watson) isn't developed as a character really, but her two dimensional stereotype strongly resembles that of the Buck Henry-created sociopath Suzanne Stone (Nicole Kidman) in To Die For (1995, Van Sant). And Nicky seems to anchor the cast.

At least the actors were all actually pretty and young. Katy Chang is flawlessly cute.

While the film doesn't attain the heights of an actual tabloid opera, its modestly scaled case study does manage to show what it feels like to be a teenager again; and additionally, the dangers and excitement of breaking into houses, burglary, and snorting cocaine (for those of us who didn't actually experience these thrills first hand).

--Dregs