Sofia Coppola's 'Marc by Sofia'

                  

 Among the many things I generally ignore, high fashion ranks near the top of the list. Occasionally, I peruse the photos in one of the New York Times' glossy Sunday supplements, an activity that seldom fails to amuse. How could it not, with designs so exaggerated they might be taken as examples of human absurdity?

  Keep my attitude in mind as you read this review of Sofia Coppola's documentary, Marc by Sofia, a look at the way fashion icon Marc Jacobs goes about the business of designing clothes and creating a show. 

    Set in the months before Jacobs's 2024 spring show, the movie mixes show preparations with clips from the movies that inspired Jacobs (Sweet Charity, All That Jazz, and Hello Dolly). He's also partial to the work of Rainer Werner Fassbinder and an admirer of Elizabeth Taylor's jewelry. Diana Ross's sequins? The best.

    A long-time friend of Jacobs, Coppola takes a casual stroll through Jacobs' world, stitching together a tale that puts the designer's sensibilities on display while offering sketchy biographical material: At the age of 15, Jacobs left home to live with his grandmother, a meticulously organized shopper. His widowed mother had remarried, and Jacobs didn't like the stepdad. 

    Perhaps biographical detail doesn't matter. Jacobs seems to live in a world ruled less by the accumulated sediments of his past than the cultural ether he inhales, absorbs, and, then, transforms. 

   Some have seen Coppola's film as a look at Jacobs's creative process, which includes attention to every detail of his looming show: from set design to the quality of the false eyelashes for models to the music he’ll play. I approached the movie as I would a visit to another planet, a journey into exotic and unfamiliar terrain.

    In the 2024 show, women wearing wigs bigger than beach balls, display their chalky, mannequin-like expressions and wear outsized clothing that falls slightly short of qualifying as housing. 

   The clothing seems part of a satirical joke. 

   Is it?

   Beats me.

    It probably helps to be familiar with the arc of Jacobs' career, which Coppola presents mostly with references -- from his stint at Perry Ellis to his mold-breaking work at Louis Vuitton, where he added humor and flash that stretched the Vuitton brand. 

   And, of course, there's Jacobs' fabled Grunge period, that moment in the 1990s when sighs over elegance were replaced by the enraged banshee screams of rockers and those who followed them. We even see a clip from Jacobs' days as a student at the Parsons School of Design.

   But Jacobs works in the real world, too -- sort of. He once designed clothes for Winona Ryder's shoplifting trial. 

    The movie can be amusing, although it seems directed at those who already know that Jacobs is a major designer whose work has proven influential. 

   Coppola doesn't tell us, by the way, where Jacobs, now 62, stands in relation to other contemporary designers. And she doesn't include much by way of outside observation about his work. A little more context would have been welcome.

    I've admired Coppola's work in movies such as The Virgin Suicides (1999), Lost in Translation (2003), Marie Antoinette (2006), and The Bling Ring (2013). Nothing about Marc by Sofia made me think less of Coppola as a filmmaker, although it does seem like a bit of a digression.

 

    

     

Marriage to Elvis was no bed of roses

   
    Sofia Coppola's Priscilla tells the story of a 14-year-old girl swept up in Elvis Presley's fame. The message is clear: Narcissistic mega-stars wield power that can lead them to control those who fall under their sway.

   Priscilla Presley's relationship with Elvis deprived her of much of her adolescence. Priscilla became a prisoner in a well-appointed castle called Graceland, Presley's Memphis mansion. She spent her time waiting for Elvis to return home and waiting for Elvis to decide that she was old enough for sex.  Like a decorative houseplant that was destined to become potbound, Priscilla increasingly felt constrained.

   Presley met Priscilla (Cailee Spaeny) in 1959 while serving in the Army in Germany. Priscilla's stepfather (Ari Cohen), an Air Force officer, also was stationed in Germany. Priscilla's mother (Dagmara Dominczyk) warned her daughter that she was leaping into troubled waters but Priscilla was too much under Elvis's spell to listen.

  Watching Priscilla, it's easy to forget how big Elvis's stardom was: Coppola treats it as an stablished fact. Her behind the scenes look,  presents a multi-faceted, if inconclusive, portrait of Elvis.

  It's not entirely clear whether Elvis -- played by Jacob Elordi -- was an abusive husband, a Peter Pan-ish figure suspended in boyhood or a pill-popping star who knew how to use his country-boy charm when needed. Perhaps  Elvis was all of those things, a kaleidoscopic figure who looms over Priscilla's young life. 

      Spaney, now 26, convincingly portrays a naive adolescent, an isolated young woman, and a woman who, after 13 years, realizes that staying with Elvis, whom she loved, would keep her in a state of suspended animation. She'd always be the 14-year-old innocent Elvis wanted in his life after the death of his mother.

     With the help of cinematographer Philippe Le Sourd and production designer Tamara Deverell, Coppola steeps the movie in airless isolation in which Priscilla feels the loneliness induced by Elvis's manipulation, cruelty, and possessive love.

    While Elvis made movies in Hollywood or toured, Priscilla lived a guarded existence at home. She attended a Catholic girls' school but was forbidden to invite any of her classmates home. And when Elvis arrived, he typically surrounded himself with his "boys," an ever-present gaggle of comrades that made little room for Priscilla.

      This oppressive atmosphere supports the film thematically but also threatens to choke it as the story proceeds from episode to episode. In Priscilla, style becomes both a virtue and a trap that generates a bit of boredom, at least it did for me.

         Something else: Elvis was six feet tall. Priscilla Presley is 5'4."

         At 6 feet 5 inches, Elordi towers over the 5'1" Spaeny. The height difference serves to reinforce Elvis's dominance but also becomes a distraction. Twenty-four when he met the 14-year-old Priscilla, Elvis looks like a giant with a Lilliputian girlfriend.

         Elordi's Elvis mixes charm, tantrums, and self-absorption. He adopts an approach to dialogue that might be called the "Memphis mumble," a half-whispered lilt Elvis may have employed in the womanizing that's referenced throughout.

          The movie stops short of showing Priscilla' s post-Elvis life, which included her becoming president of Elvis Presley Enterprises, which, among other things, turned Graceland into a tourist attraction. Maybe that would have complicated the narrative arc in which Priscilla, now 78, saves herself from Elvis in order to be herself. 

        Based on Priscilla Presley's 1985 memoir, Elvis and Me, the movie pretty much sticks to what Priscilla could observe both in terms of scene-by-scene development and overall perspective. Priscilla Presley served as the film's executive producer. 

       Coppola remains a gifted director who's not afraid to give her movies (Virgin Spring, Marie Antoinette, and The Bling Ring) distinctive flavor. This time, watching the inevitable unfold can dull the story's edges, leaving Spaeny's nicely realized performance to fill any empty spaces. 

        I know folks hate mixed reactions to movies. In or out, some readers demand.

       Sorry, but that's not me. Priscilla lingered with me, even though at times, it seemed as if it was drifting toward a foregone conclusion with too little happening along the way.

         

Too restrained for its own good

Sofia Coppola's The Beguiled : lost in an arty haze.

There's an alarming gap between style and substance in Sofia Coppola's new movie, The Beguiled, a remake of a 1971 Clint Eastwood film about a wounded Union soldier who finds refuge in a Virginia school for girls during the waning days of the Civil War.

In a sense, Coppola has taken grade "B" material and given it an "A"-grade artistic gloss that sometimes threatens to suffocate the movie's dramatic life.

Not surprisingly, the soldier's presence among these women prompts turmoil as students and teachers try to adjust to a male presence. Some of the students -- notably a character played by Elle Fanning -- are just beginning to discover their sexuality, making the movie a hothouse of suppressed and overt desire, as well as of trust and mistrust.

Too often, though, The Beguiled is a hothouse in which someone forgets to turn up the heat.

Three performances stand out. Colin Farrell plays soldier John McBurney as a cagey fellow with anger simmering beneath a solicitous surface. An excellent Nicole Kidman brings subtle levels of calculation to the role of headmistress Martha Farnsworth, the woman who washes the soldier's partially naked body when he's brought to the school.

Kirsten Dunst's excels as Edwina Danny, a teacher for whom McBurney represents liberating escape from an impending spinsterhood.

Coppola eliminates one of the characters found in director Don Siegel's earlier version, an enslaved woman. That means that Coppola mostly ignores the perverse undercurrents of racism. If you wanted to push the point (and some have), you could call it an elegant form of denial.

Coppola's overly decorous approach elevates atmospherics. Her movie includes a couple of gruesome events but doesn't seem entirely committed to them. No more can said without spoilers.

Every character in The Beguiled, I suppose, must react to a war-time situation in which norms have been upset, but the movie could have used a little more of the bile that ultimately begins to flow.