Women in Film // Director analysis: Sofia Coppola

I wanted to look into certain directors to analyse their view of women through their movies. In reading Situating the Feminist Gaze and Spectatorship in Postwar Cinema by Marcelline Block, I came across a lot of useful information about the current female director Sofia Coppola: I am very fond of her movies and always felt they accurately represented women, but from reading this analysis I have realised some things.

Sofia Coppola is a prominent and successful female director in today's world of film, whose films feature mostly female protagonists. I wanted to look at how she represents them and if they are supposedly 'feminist' - something automatically pinned to female directors these days. I have previously watched her movies, but I revisited them for this task.

Each movie of hers seems to focus on a lonely woman or girl(s), and their struggles to function in society. She mostly represents her characters and their personalities through their movement and appearance on screen, as there is not always a whole lot of dialogue in her works.

Her movies feature caucasian, middle/upper class girls who spend a lot of time lounging around in their underwear. This, to me, does not reflect a strong feminist view... it seems lazy - she is picking girls most similar to her and her background.

Coppola's films at best fall under the ambiguous political and theoretical umbrella known as postfeminism. Coppola's female protagonists are women who lounge about -often in their underwear- shop compulsively, and are passive-aggressive. 

Politically, postfeminism is either uninterested in women's rights and gender equality or takes these for granted. Postfeminism often positions itself against the "killjoy" elements of feminism whose orthodoxy means that women should not enjoy "girly" pleasures.
The lack of an explicit feminist agenda may render Coppola's films a postfeminist pleasure for those willing to accept un-empowered women subjects.   

Coppola's films may seem politically ambiguous in terms of aesthetics, as her questionable framing of women's faces and bodies dances a fine line between duplicating and effectually exploiting the way the various social observers of her characters such as pubescent boys, older men, and the French court view women.

Marcelline Block 

Parties, shopping and music seems to be her only frames of reference.

As described above, she often films close ups of women's face and bodies, which is something often used in objectifying films.
She seems to create images of women that are very traditional, such as sunbathing, applying make-up, having baths.
So has she changed the conventional way these features are normally seen on screen, as it is coming from a woman's perspective?

Over the course of her first three feature films, Coppola appears to refine her interest in and execution of conveying a woman's inner life and experience through her exterior. She not only hones in on her female subject by reducing the number of characters, but also develops her cinematography and editing to gain the most depth.

The Virgin Suicides 

Despite it's title, Coppola's film, like the Jeffrey Eugenide's novel on which it is based, is not so much about suicide as it is about youth and what Coppola herself calls the "'epicness' of teendom." The girls' dying young embalms them forever in what patriarchal culture would consider their most exquisite form, and images of these nubile blondes will forever haunt the neighbourhood boys who obsessively watch and spy on them.

While the fantasies are generated by onscreen male characters, they also belong to the film's audience, for these are the manifestations of a collective cultural memory of girlhood, a memory generated at the intersection of personal experience and archetypes produced by popular culture. 

Coppola involves the viewer in the American girl fantasies during the film's opening credits. The title "The Virgin Suicides" appears across a dreamy looking sky in various different childish and stereotypically feminine styles of cursive.
This could be seen as very stereotypical and representing the young girls as vapid and to be put in a box - however their is a varied approach with different styles that could not all be automatically pinned to 'girliness'. (That being said the main handwriting is very feminine with hearts dotting the i's).

Lost in Translation

In general, Charlotte spends a lot of her time in her underpants, which at first seems problematic as it fosters her "to-be-looked-at-ness," to use Mulvey's term.
However, the way she lays and moves around is not performed for the male eye; she is generally without an onscreen male surrogate for the viewer, and the way she frequently folds up her body has the opposite effect of display.

In fact, the moment of greatest exposure, when she briefly stands on the bed to hang a cherry blossom paper lantern, ends with her stubbing her toe getting down, undermining what may have potentially been a provocative moment.

Likewise, in the scene where Charlotte performs karaoke, Johansson's singing voice (thin and stumbling) and the pink wig she wears seem to ironize or deflate what would traditionally work as erotic spectacle, drawing attention to the act of performance and masquerade.

The increased time alone with the female protagonist is accompanied by a new type of shot used by Coppola: Charlotte seen from over her shoulder, which seems to encourage the viewer to identify with her point of view rather than objectifying her. (We are looking at Charlotte and with Charlotte). 

A similar use of jump cuts is found when showing Charlotte making herself up in the hotel bathroom. Charlotte's own contemplation of her face, application of lipstick and playing with her hair would encourage us to objectify her as well, but again, the splicing of these images through jump cuts disrupts our visual pleasure of any one image.

Overview 

While most critics find Coppola's films to be successful as mood pieces, some are wary of her achieving this atmosphere by having female characters spend so much time on their backs or in bathtubs.

It is a possible concern that Coppola's female characters come off as empty-headed since they spend a lot of time lying around and do not say anything of intellectual value. But then again, maybe their seemingly lacking intellectual prowess is more complex than that.

Although Coppola's female characters may talk little, this does not mean that nothing is going on beneath the surface. In fact, Coppola's quiet scenes depict scenarios where most people - women and men - realistically would be engaged in introspective reflection, especially when alone, such as the cab, train, and carriage rides found throughout all of her films.




CONCLUSION

I feel that Coppola's work is definitely not progressive, apart from the fact that the main characters are women - which is still lower than men in the industry. It isn't progressive, as the characters are mostly very privileged and white - something incredibly common in Hollywood. They may be women, yes, but there is often a lack of character development which lends itself to not really creating a strong character.
However, her films are strong alternatives to a lot of Hollywood's films, where a woman's appearance is focused on and endless stereotypes are shown.