#8 Marie Antoinette
Hey guys, it's Marie Antoinette Week! I had a birthday, so let us eat cake and celebrate the filmmaker I want to be when I grow up. I am of course talking about Sofia Coppola. Most people will recognize her as the annoying daughter of Michael Corleone in Godfather 3, but she's actually the talented daughter of Francis Ford Coppola who directed all the Godfathers. In this week's blog, we'll take a look at her third, very controversial, and confusingly un-hyphenated film Marie Antoinette. Then there's a ranking of all her features so far and I wrote a profile that can conceivably double as a fan letter in the tradition of Stan. Because sometimes I think that if she wasn't so married to a French rock star, we'd be dating right now. Other times I'm sure I made her up during an especially sweet codeine buzz. Most of the time I love her work so much, it hurts to watch any of it. So yeah, welcome to my totally normal Sofia Coppola party. The theme is female existential angst, the dress code is soft pink & money green. Pour yourself something bubbly, try not to drown in it, and have a mahrvelous time, dahrlings!
Marie Antoinette (2006)
Did any of guys watch that MTV show "My Sweet 16"? Well, Marie Antoinette is My Sweet 16: Ancient Regime Edition. It's Gossip Girl 200 years avant la lettre. Other French pun. It's delicious, and not just thanks to the omnipresent macaroons. Coppola was allowed to film at Versailles for her magnum of opi, and she added her own special touch by mixing exquisite decorating detail with anachronistic pop music for a cheeky, cheeky edge. The whole thing feels like the result of 1770s rococo and 1980s post-punk meeting at a fancy pastry shop and doin' it up against the counter. That montage of cakes and period-appropriate Manolo Blahniks to Bow Wow Wow's "I Want Candy" alone is somebody's porn. As beautiful as it is though, Marie Antoinette the movie, like Marie-Antoinette the main character, is also boring. Achingly boring. Because all the curly opulence and tall-ass wigs in the world can't cover up the fact that nothing ever happens to this girl at all. It's a role Kirsten Dunst, original Becky With Good Hair But No Inner Life, was born to play. Her tale begins when she's taken away from her Austrian home at the age of 14 so she can marry the Dauphin of France Louis XVI, a weirdo teenager thoroughly uninterested in matters of the carnal variety. Faced with the brutally impossible task of producing an heir to a guy who refuses to fuck her, young Marie-Antoinette turns to the same things we all do when confronted with a cruel and unjust world: shopping, gossip, and the occasional tumble in l'hay with a handsome Swedish army officer. Eventually, she manages to squeeze out a couple of tiny blue bloods, but that doesn't fix her isolation or Louis' continued lack of lustiness, leaving gaping holes in this lonely lady's life that can only be filled by making it rain. Or, really, pour. Between her exorbitant outfits, champagne-drenched parties and serious gambling habit, it's not hard to see why the starving masses in Paris start to build up a bit of a resentment. Nevermind all the French riches her husband is meanwhile funneling into the endless foreign adventure called the American Revolution. When has a country ever cracked under something like that. No, it's Marie-Antoinette's cake fund that's at the root of everybody's problems. Though, speaking as an expert, if it wasn't for the willingness of dumb-fuck people to believe dumb-fuck things, we would never have any revolutions. At the end of the movie, both Marie-Antoinette and Sophia Coppola had to deal with an angry French mob seething about the stuff that happened at Versailles. But while the crowds storming the gates in 1789 sought to dispel the royals' mythic power, the critics at Cannes were mad at this movie for not being mythic enough. They hissed and booed Coppola's obnoxious, irreverent use of their cultural heritage to tell a story about a woman and not a monster. Jeez Louise, France, pick a lane. Marie Antoinette: because it's pretty, and when the world is about to fall off the edge of history, pretty goes a long way.
Weird Profile: Sofia Coppola
Remember that post I did on how much Wonder Woman sucks? I still feel bad for not being able to get on that feminist bandwagon, so I'm hoping to make up for it with this gushing profile of Sofia Coppola, because she basically makes cinematic vaginas and she's good at it. I'm only barely kidding. Coppola likes to shoot her films in exclusively soft-pink filters ranging from salmon to flamingo, and they're almost always about girls who just want to have fun and women who be shopping. In fact, she is such an expert at depicting female self-indulgence that her oeuvre helped me to finally realize why every guy I know is so into Scorsese - it's kind of irresistible when someone takes your every vice and makes it look like the ultimate hedonist cool. People have accused her of telling trivial stories about out-of-touch, rich women such as herself, but I'm here to argue that all that decadent gloss is actually an expression of pain rather than privilege. And this, I believe, makes her revolutionary. If the 20th century was the era of the angry young man, then Coppola's insistence on chronicling the existential anguish of young women might mean she's the most important director of the 21st.
One reason Coppola is disliked by some critics and beloved by me is that she never makes movies about strong, heroic women who actively and defiantly take control of their lives. Instead she portrays clueless, unlikable cowards who have no power over their fate and buckle under pressure. Most of her female protagonists are trapped, bored and suffering from some kind of sexual repression. The sisters from Virgin Suicides are locked up in their house by their prudish parents, Scarlett Johansson is stuck in a hotel room minus neglectful husband, Marie-Antoinette can't leave Versailles or limp-dick Louis, and the Beguiled girls are confined to their school while the men are out doing Civil War. Coppola was a fashion designer before she went into the family business, and don't ask me how, but she manages to combine her father's dispassionate eye with a delicate, intensely personal style. And she uses this aesthetic to capture the inescapable worlds her leading ladies inhabit, all the little and big ways in which they try to cope. More often than not, their survival tactics materialize in the form of stunning, unapologetic girly-hood. Think about it this way: the teenage boy's room is Holden Caulfield's character incarnate (or, if you're not a reader, Eminem's); it rejects all good taste and social norms, reflecting its occupant's adolescent terror and hormonal frustration. Coppola's work follows the logic of a girly girl's room, where the same angst is channeled into creating a universe of cuteness. It maps the sparkly sanctuaries women retreat into to fight tedium and keep hostile forces at bay. In Coppola's hands, the harmless concept of cute becomes a kind of a renegade philosophy. Her stuff is shallow, but dark. Meaningless, but intimate. It's the magic of Scarlett Johansson's peach panties before she enters a land of confusion. It's Marie-Antoinette surrounding herself with more pastry than people. It's the ribbon braided in a Beguiled girl's hair as she prepares to commit murder. It's vanity, weaponised. It's the shy girl manifesto.
What makes Coppola more than a glorified music video director and one of the greats, is that in the end, the walls of the glammed-up spaces her heroines build for themselves start closing in on them. Their pink prisons are unable to restrain their starving lady libidos. With lots of poise and zero judgement, Coppola shows how searing loneliness slowly takes over, eventually gets the best of everyone, lashes out with terrible force and destroys everything. In Lost In Translation, it nearly breaks up two marriages, in The Beguiled it maims and kills a man, in The Virgin Suicides it annihilates a family and in Marie Antoinette it brings down an Empire. God, I love her so much. She just... makes me wanna buy her something nice.
Cute Top 6
For those of you unfamiliar with Coppola’s work and wondering where to start, and because she is a woman and must be quantified, here's a personal ranking of all the feature films Sofia Coppola has made so far, including an emoji trailer to give you a taste:
1. Lost in Translation 🇯🇵🙎🏼♀️🙎🏻♂🇯🇵
2. Marie Antoinette 👸🏼🍰
3. The Virgin Suicides 🙎🏼♀️x5 😵x5
4. The Beguiled 🙎🏼♀️🙎🏼♀️🙎🏼♀️🙎🏼♀️🙎🏼♀️🙎🏼♀️🙎🏼♀️🙎🏻♂
5. Somewhere 🙎♂🏎👯♀️
6. The Bling Ring 👠🕶💍💄🍾
Coda 1
Vogue! Check out Madonna embracing her queen-of-pop status in this hand-fan-centered performance at the 1990 MTV Video Awards. You guys think this is where Coppola got the idea? Or do you think this particular Ven-diagram overlap of Marie-Antoinette, Madonna, and Coppola is just a natural confluence of material girls who dominate their respective fields? #OGMG
Coda 2
#pinkpilled - I realized that if I ever do mass murder, this Sofia Coppola profile is going to be circulated as proof that I was an incel terrorist. Which lead me to ponder: if Fight Club is the 4chan Bible, does this mean every Sofia Coppola film is a kind of Lady Fight Club? I am Jack's absolute delight with that thought.
Coda 3
In the time it took me to write this week's blog, Nicki Minaj's new video Chun-Li has amassed more than 53 million views on YouTube. My theory: this video shows that Nicki is the Marie-Antoinette of our times. The song is about how, like Chun-Li in Street Fighter, Nicki is the lone female player in a man's game and therefore the target of unfair flack all the time. This is true. But it's also true that she's a terrible rapper, thinks her ass is a Rodin, and can't stop name-dropping fashion designers, so most of the flack is downright deserved. When half-way through the song, she channels Tony Montana: "They need rappers like me/ They NEED rappers like me/ So they can get on their fucking keyboards/ and make me the bad guy. Chun-Li", I can hear an echo of Marie-Antoinette: "They need royals like me. They NEED royals like me. So they can fire up their printing presses and make me the bad guy. Ennui." I mean - just think about how much easier it would've been to convince people to storm Buckingham Palace if Prince Harry would've married an in-bred British lady who thinks horses are magic but people with work-related injuries should be shot. Sometimes a well-placed villain can do more good than any hero. Who knew Nicki Minaj was an accelerationist.