Let Them Eat Pesto Sauce
The Sofia Coppola backlash has begun! Stand back!
Coppola’s MARIE-ANTOINETTE, which premiered this week at Cannes, was roundly booed by the audience of film writers and critics. As the Guardian puts it, “while some of the audience…clearly enjoyed it, many did not.” Oh the British and their fabled understatement. Coppola herself has professed disappointment.
Sofia Coppola’s films have all been personal statements, seems to me. THE VIRGIN SUICIDES documented her (emotional) life in high school, while LOST IN TRANSLATION was a thinly fictionalized account of her alienated months in Japan. If the audience is turning on her now, perhaps the choice of Maria-Antoinette as her onscreen proxy strikes them as, well, too appropriate. Born of privilege, scornful of the riff-raff - perhaps she doesn’t recognize that to most of us, these are BAD things. We ARE the riff-raff.
Michael Cimino, a director whose obsessive attention to detail sunk HEAVEN’S GATE and bankrupted United Artists, followed that movie with YEAR OF THE DRAGON. In this thriller, Mickey Rourke plays a detective who nearly destroys his career in pursuit of a killer. “How can anyone care too much?” Roarke offered, just before a crowd of my fellow industry-savvy viewers dissolved into helpless snickering. You could almost hear UA executives moaning, “oh, it’s possible.” It was the kind of thing that is obvious to everyone in the world, unless they’re Michael Cimino.
MARIE-ANTOINETTE may be the inevitable consequence of being told that your autobiographical movie with no story is brilliant. Why wouldn’t you believe that anything you want to do is perfect, and if so then why not identify with jaded French aristocracy? Surprisingly, I think I’ll like the movie because I’ve liked Sofia’s other movies. Just remember the ego driving it all before you go in.
Box Office Weekly - we call ‘em BEFORE we see ‘em.