The Thing about Sofia

PHOTOS FROM NYTIMES BY WAY OF TOMORROW AT DAWN

Sofia Coppola is famous for her incredible sense of minimalist and classic style. Every tomboy worth their stylistic gold will almost always count Sofia Coppola as one of their style icons. If there is one "celebrity style" that I like, it's hers. She outshines every starlet on the red carpet in such a unique way that it's hard to imagine that she actually grew up in Hollywood and managed to turn out so normal/sensible. She's quite the embodiment of chic, cool and class and looks effortless in a way that seems easy to imitate, even though she's always just one step ahead. I love how she has a career, like she actually does something, rather than something amorphous and ambiguous as model-singer-designer-actress-muse that you see so much of nowadays. However I am going to throw something out there that is so controversial that it will rob me of any "indie credo" I might have had before –– I don't like her movies.

The thought had started when Somewhere (2010) popped up on my HBO Go film feed at the end of last year. For the longest time I've wanted to see it but unfortunately missed it in the theatres. The GIFs taken from the film were all over the internet and just so beautiful that I thought I could find inspiration for summer from this film. How terribly wrong I was. The soundtrack was amazing and everything looked beautiful, but I just couldn't connect with the main actor at all. Maybe the vacuousness of the film is an expression of Johnny Marco's (played by Stephen Dorff) ennui and I just didn't 'get' the film. Whatever. I could say the same for a lot of other Coppola films such as The Virgin Suicides (1999) where everything looked and sounded great, but was still a few touches from fully capturing the full poetic essence of the novel (FYI my high school english teacher was once Jeffrey Eugenides' english teacher and was the real life inspiration for Mr de Silva in Middlesex). Marie Antoinette (2006) functioned only as pure eye and ear candy. Ultimately, the reason why Coppola's films are this popular with the fashion community is because of their aesthetics and not for their story-telling capabilities. She always manages to assemble a great team of music directors and cinematographers, but the end product is never really something worth raving about. Can you deeply appreciate someone's style and aesthetics while never being really IN LOVE with their works?