Sofia Coppola

For this week, I watched three movies of Sofia Coppola. They were Marie Antoinette, Bling Ring, and Virgin Suicides. I noticed that she didn’t go out of her way to make her characters particularly likeable. In Marie Antoinette, the main character was immature and passive. She didn’t do anything redeeming. However, this movie did teach me something about the French Revolution. In history class, we learned that Marie Antoinette’s excessive spending was a big cause of the revolt. The textbook said that she actively ignored the peasants and had no empathy for their suffering. These textbooks happens to be written by men. I never saw the revolution from her perspective. Now I know that Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI were just too young to rule. They didn’t know what to do so the way society was run caused the French Revolution.

In Bling Ring, the characters were also hard to empathize with. They were privileged teens who got off on stealing. They never really cared about anything. Sofia Coppola also has anticlimactic endings. There was no satisfying resolution. Our questions were unanswered. We never found out why the kids wanted to steal from celebrities. We never find out what happens to them in prison or what happens to them afterwards. When Emma Watson does that interview at the end, it doesn’t reveal anything more about her character. It kind of feels like she ratted out her friends to the police. It’s a weird ending.

In Virgin Suicides, it started out with a suicide. It was very quiet at times. It seemed like she used ma, a method that Japanese filmmakers call the silence between claps. It feels like a pause in the action. The pacing feels slower. During Virgin Suicides, there was a lot of waiting. The girls were trapped and it really empathized the boredom and lack of freedom. However, in all of her movies, we were never bored. The characters weren’t likeable, but the story was intriguing. I found this movie the most interesting. I kept wondering about how this family came to be like this. What happened to make the mother so controlling. We never found out why the youngest daughter committed suicide.