Sofia Coppola, teenagers’ girls and feminism, case study of The Virgin Suicides and Marie-Antoinette
" - What are you doing here honey? You’re not even old enough to know how bad life gets.
- Obviously, Doctor, you’ve never been a 13-year-old girl."
From The Virgin Suicides, 1999, Sofia Coppola
Sofia Coppola has a very specific way to film teenagers, specifically teenagers’ girls. From power struggle in high school in Lick the Stars, to solitude and jealousy in The Beguiled. The vision of Sofia Coppola on teenagers’ girls is authentic. She does not depict basic stories with superficial characters with no depth. Her girls’ characters are usually lonely and lost, in a time period between the innocence of childhood and the unknown often scary adulthood. Her films seem to be the first movies on teenagers’ girls which attracted an adult and cinephile audience. What is pretty ironic, is that her films might be too violent and radical for the teenagers themselves.
As Cook said in Fifty Contemporay Film Directors on the chapter dedicated to Sofia Coppola, the director main inspiration comes from her personal and creative life itself, more than from the story of her movies. Indeed, she is polymath and has done various experimentation before becoming a director, as actress, photograph, model and creator of a musical show called Hi Octane. She imposes herself on indie wood, when it pops out at the second half of the 90’s with Pulp Fiction, The Big Lebowski and The Blair Witch Project. Indie movies were loved and watched only by cinephiles but started to impose itself commercially as well.
The naivety of childhood before the gravity of adulthood
Cook said something very interesting on the ambivalence of Sofia Coppola. The feminine aspects of her movies stand in the complex relationship between passive and active, fragility and toughness, naturalness and artifice and so on. It really is something that I feel when I watch her movies. As I said before the whole complexity of teenagerhood stands in the fact that it’s a period of time between two opposites; the sweetness of childhood and the toughness of adulthood.
In her biopic of Marie-Antoinette in 2006, the main character is a young 15 years’ old girl, who is going to be forced to become the dauphine and then the Queen of France. I feel that the first sequence represents the most this idea of innocence violently taken away. The movie opened on the music Natural’s Not In It by Gang Of Four, which is ironic because this song talks about the society of consumption which is going to be the vice of the young Marie-Antoinette. The first scene shows us a young girl, nearly a child, which runs in her castle and is clumsy. Her mother wants to send her in France to improve the relationship between the two countries but warns her that in France “All eyes will be on you”. She leaves on a blue coach and when she meets the mistress of the household at the border, she can’t help giving her a hug despite the fact that the mistress has a strict face and wanted to do only the bow. Then she has to leave, first her two Ladies and then, despite her will, her dog. She is totally undressed by the Ladies of France, to then wear only clothes of her new country. She has to give up her entirely life and even identity to be accepted on the French Kingdom. I think this scene can be put in parallel with the teenagerhood, the leaving of simplicity of childhood and the discover of responsibilities, new codes, and a hostile world.
In her first movie, The Virgin Suicides, the story follows five sisters. As a parallel that we can make with Marie-Antoinette, the opening of The Virgin Suicides is also significant. On a background sound, of the soft instrumental of Playground Love by Air, sounds of birds and children shouts, the neighborhood seems happier than ever. The shine is bright which gives a warm yellow color to the scene. But the sound of fire sirens catches our attention, before the all atmosphere changes suddenly. We are in a blue cold bathroom, and the sound of water drops has taken the place of the birds. The first attempt of suicide has happened. As Bree Hoskin said in her article called Playground love: landscape and longing in Sofia Coppola's The Virgin Suicides, all of the first warm atmosphere represents the nostalgia of childhood where we don’t see the problems. Teenagerhood can be a violent hit. This scene made me think about the openings of Blue Velvet by David Lynch and American beauty by Sam Mendes, which was directed on the same year. Both of these films started as well with a perfect vision of an American neighborhood, but we quickly realized that it is a lie. Behind the perfect houses and red roses terrible secrets are often hided.
Beginning of Marie-Antoinette
Beginning of The Virgin Suicides
Loneliness and isolation
Marie-Antoinette and The Virgin Suicides both take place in a hostile world. In the King’s court and in the American neighborhood, gossips and malice are all over the place. This negative society isolates the young teenagers who can’t manage to find their place.
In The Virgin Suicides the girls are growing up in a strict Catholic family. It’s hard to really know them and their feelings as the story is told by a group of teenagers’ boys who have developed a fascination for them. They can’t tell their own lives, which is the first step of their isolation in terms of the narrative of the story. As Cook said, the vision of the boys is totally idyllic, and not realistic. I think it developed a feminist vision. The girls are often hushed and sexualized as an early age, where the boys are not. They are also isolated in terms of their sexuality. As I said before teenagerhood is the pass in becoming an adult, and in this case a woman. But in The Virgin Suicides this way is forbidden. Their bodies are constantly hidden by their mother, and their love lives controlled as well. When Lux, the 14 years’ old one, is going to disobey her parents by spending the night outside, the four girls (as one of them had already committed suicide) are going to be deschooled and sequestered in the house. This will lead girls to be lonely and isolated from the rest of the world, because their puberty is not accepted and even punished.
It is interesting because Marie-Antoinette depicted the opposite. The young Austrian has to marry at an early age, and her isolation is going to be led by the fact that she cannot manage to get pregnant. She receives letters from her mum who put pression on her to blend in the life of the castle, but also to get pregnant in order to strengthen the relationship between France and Austria. There is a scene which depict the loneliness of Marie-Antoinette who loses her identity for the royalty interests. She received a letter from her mom who told her that a sister is pregnant, but she cannot be happy about it as Marie-Antoinette is not. On the piano composition Opus 23 by Dustin O’Halloran, we hear the voice of the mother, as the dauphine leans on the wall covered by flowers’ tapestry which melt with the illustration of her dress. She lost herself and her own body on which she doesn’t have control. At the end of the scene she looks at the camera as a cry for help. As Cook said the young girl, played by Kristen Dunst, loses herself from all of this pression. The shots often lost her in the big castle of Versailles, a castle that is not constructed in a human scale and tend to dehumanize the relationships between humans that live in it.
The four sisters a sequestered in The Virgin Suicides
Marie-Antoinette reads the letter from her mother
Marie-Antoinette and The Virgin Suicides don’t depict a happy future for their characters. Their stories are tragic, and the only issue is death, one that was imposed on Marie-Antoinette, and one that was staged by the five sisters as the only way to achieved freedom.