Voice Of Her Generation: Sofia Coppola

In just three films - The Virgin Suicides (1999), Lost In Translation (2003), and last year's Marie Antoinette, Sofia Coppola has carved a niche for herself as the voice of her generation in the same way F.Scott Fitzgerald was of his.

Both generations are "lost," and for many of the same reasons.

Well, let me amend that. Coppola is at least the voice of her generation of girls while Quentin Tarantino is the voice of his generation of boys - which explains why Coppola's females feel so depressed.

Ms. Coppola's girls no longer live in the movie world of boy meets girl. They are confused - alienated from the old conventions but as yet without new rules. They are intelligent young women, but their intelligence makes them sadly aware of their predicament.

To rebel against the rules set for them by society (i.e., by their parents' male-centric generation) and therefore risk destruction; or to tolerate them, assuring a life of stultifying boredom? Other choices seem to be beyond them.

They can't decide what to do with sex, with love, with boys or men. And they have not much ambition to be useful or productive.

What they clearly get is style as an expression of self, and willingly indulge and overindulge ... until something important might come along. Their lives lack drama and they strive to create some. That drive is the center of the universe of pop culture.

If Coppola's social philosophy can be labeled as post-feminist (or as one critic wrote, post post-feminist), her story-telling style is anti-narrative post-modern.

She eschews plot, seems only faintly interested in dialogue as a vehicle to carry ideas. She prefers to slow the pace of her scenes to linger until the viewer is as bored as her characters - seemingly a way to create the sludgy mood of ennui and indecision that she is mostly interested in.

It is that mood that her audience most identifies with - the time of life when time wasting is a full time pre-occupation.

The girls in The Virgin Suicides are trapped in their suburban home in the 1970's with unsatisfactory parents and not much hope.

Coppola is not much interested in the question of why the five girls choose death, but rather wants to create a surrealistic comedic mood that seems to ask why not - why don't all girls, of that age at least, say fuck it and die.

Kirsten Dunst played the sister, Lux, who is the center of the tale, and other sisters are named Marie and Therese. Coppola chose Dunst to portray Marie Antoinette, who incidentally had a mother and daughter named Marie Therese. She chose Marianne Faithfull, an icon of 60's pop indulgence, to portray Marie's mother, who advises her daughter on the perils of fame.

Marie Antoinette's dilemma, as Ms. Coppola sees it, is not much different from Paris Hilton or any celebutante today.

Marie's lap dogs mirror any photo of Paris with her purse pups. The shoe montage, anachronistic teenage girlish conversations, and pop soundtrack choices make her point with a wink.

Today’s girl identifies easily with Coppola's Marie. She expresses herself by creating an image — in fashion and shopping, partying with cool friends. Her palaces were like our college campuses, dance clubs, dorms. She has style and as much independence as her position in society — i.e., her celebrity — allows.

Today’s girl accepts celebrity indulgence and extravagance as leadership qualities. The language of social responsibility is off her radar (or ipod) screen. She finds nothing wrong with spending on Manolos while African children go barefoot; binge eating and drinking despite starvation rampant on the other side of the palace moat. Modish charitable causes are merely effective PR excuses for red carpet exposure and parties till dawn.

Charlotte of Lost In Translation might as well be stranded in Versailles as in Tokyo. Her husband (played by Giovanni Ribisi) is close in type to Louis Auguste (played by Jason Schwartzman), both boys who are not quite satisfactory men, more interested in their toys and pals than in being lover or companion to their girls.

Bored, lonely, depressed, Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) meets Bob (Bill Murray), who is in a similar state if not the same stage of life. Charlotte, like Bob, is too smart for the room, looking for something to be passionate about. She is instantly attracted to Bob, who is the opposite of all the young, attractive, aimless and humorless people she knows. He is old, weatherbeaten, aimless - but funny. The fact that Bob is a minor celebrity doesn't hurt her interest in him either.

I think what the audience latched onto was the sense of apartness that these two misfits share. They are aliens in a strange world (as are Marie and the Lisbon sisters) in which rituals and conventions are confusing, communication by articulated speech is laughably ineffective.

Charlotte is too mature for her age group, and Bill wants to still be silly and happy, instead of slowing down in his practical, settling-for-mediocrity middle age. They meet each other half way into their terrifying spins and hold hands for the time it takes for the movie to play, then very reluctantly part.

Coppola is less interested in what they say to each other than the mood they let themselves indulge - a sleepless but dreamy half-conscious state of faint amusement about their lives.

Except for one scene in which the couple try to sleep side by side barely touching each other and talk vaguely about life, the scenes and dialogue are pointedly pointless.

She allows Murray to riff in his usual anarchic way, gently funning all the quaint Japanese thingies, while Johansson chuckles appreciatively at his liberating wit.

In the end, the experience seems to help Charlotte a little bit, though none of her problems are solved.

And that's okay with the audience. They've got nothing but time to kill.