Off with Hollywood's Head: Sofia Coppola As Feminine Auteur‪.‬

In the Autumn 2006 publication of Camera Obscura, Yvonne Rainer discussed "Mulvey's Legacy" and the current state of feminism and film. In closing, Rainer posed a question that has been on the minds of many who are concerned with women's cinema: "The air I now breathe feels weighted with expectancy. I continue to be buoyed by that history, a history that feels about to erupt again. How did it happen then? What is to be done now?" (169). In this article, I suggest that such concerns have begun to be addressed by a most unexpected source: a privileged, mainstream filmmaker who routinely engages feminist, postfeminist, and male-dominated auteur film traditions, while refusing any such categorization. Over the past decade, in her short film Lick the Star (1998), and in her first three feature films, The Virgin Suicides (2000), Lost in Translation (2003), and Marie Antoinette (2006), Sofia Coppola has developed an aesthetic that simultaneously invokes foundational gaze theory, comments upon postfeminist concerns about consumption as a "feminine" ideal, and attempts to mirror and reverse macho tropes from the 1960s and 1970s male auteur movement, which includes her father. It is interesting that Rainer's question of "what to do" with contemporary women's cinema occurs as critics and audiences themselves struggle with what to do with Coppola's films, placing her in the middle of categories that have always remained at odds within film criticism: male and female, mainstream and independent, feminism and auteurship. In fact, the critical response to Coppola's work has often divided itself along these very lines. In spite of (or perhaps because of) a body of work that stands as a direct assault on Hollywood's status quo, the source of attack, for those who wish to attack her, has routinely focused on a perceived lack of depth. Even in a positive review of Lost in Translation, The Boston Globe's Ty Burr claims Coppola's film is "longer on atmosphere and observation than on story." Marie Antoinette took even more direct hits from critics who likened it to "licorice" (Stevens), downplayed it as a "gorgeous confection" (Rea) and a "sugarcoated romp [that] doesn't take itself [...] particularly seriously" (Morris), and claimed that the film "is neither shallow nor profound, just inconsequential." As Anthony Lane wrote in The New Yorker, "if you want your movies to feel like watered silk--lustrous, precious, and thinner than skin--then Sofia Coppola's latest venture is for you." Film Threat's Peter Vonder Haar was even more direct in his assertion, "reports of boos [...] are more understandable now, not because Marie Antoinette is an inaccurate or indifferent look at French history (it is), but because it's self-indulgent shit. Booing--and beheading--are too good for it."