The Morning After
Sofia Coppola's films—including Marie Antoinette, now in theaters—aren't just about the existential angst of young women, but that after every joy, there's a comedown.
By Brett McCracken | posted 10/24/2006
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Sofia Coppola might be best known as the fashionable daughter of the legendary filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola. But for anyone who saw her directorial debut, 1999's The Virgin Suicides, or her mega-successful Lost in Translation (2003), it is apparent that the 35-year-old writer/director is a formidable filmmaker in her own right.
Coppola on the 'Marie Antoinette' set with Kirsten Dunst
She's got big shoes to fill, but after two acclaimed films and a third one—Marie Antoinette, now in theaters—getting lots of buzz, it looks like she's filling them.
Critics love writing about and analyzing interesting young filmmakers like Sofia Coppola, and many have noted her seeming preoccupation with the existential drama of teen girl protagonists. Feminist criticism has a lot to say about The Virgin Suicides, a story about five adolescent sisters in the '70s who kill themselves because, apparently, their oppressive suburban existence—and their rigidly strict parents—holds no better option. And the Scarlett Johansson character of Charlotte in Lost in Translation is also trapped in a boxed-in life, in this case the existential doldrums known as the married-off twentysomething years. And Marie Antoinette—a girl for whom life was a rigid, paved path from her aristocratic birth—fits perfectly into Coppola's desensitized, directionless girl heroine.
After seeing Marie Antoinette, however, and looking back on Coppola's first two films, there is something else that I see as the most profound thread between the three. What is most interesting about the young female protagonists in these films is not that they are young or female, but that they are dealing with life as if it were over by age 25. There is a thick existential anxiety in each of these films—a "chasing after the wind" sense of urgency that shouldn't be a part of anyone's life at age seventeen. Should it?
When most girls are worrying about nail polish, horses, and amateur photography, Coppola's heroines are dying for one bit of transcendence before the chance slips away. The Lisbon sisters in Suicides come to a place where life—without any outlet or perspective of a better future—becomes not worth living. Charlotte in Translation is not as desperate, but nonetheless feels stuck and hopelessly unguided despite being a beautiful twentysomething with a degree from Yale. And Marie Antoinette is barely fifteen before she realizes that a life of freedom and youthful carelessness was never really an option for her.
The beautiful Lisbon sisters of 'The Virgin Suicides'
I don't think Coppola is saying that all, or even most, adolescent girls are this way. Rather, Coppola is showing us in these extreme examples a heavy truth about life: it goes by quickly, and to borrow a phrase from Walker Percy, sometimes the "everydayness" is just too much to bear. Thus, we live for the moments of transcendence, because life is short and 90 percent of it is some sort of letdown. As Solomon writes in Ecclesiastes, "However many years a man may live, let him enjoy them all. But let him remember the days of darkness, for they will be many. Everything to come is meaningless" (11:8).
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