Don't Be Cruel

Sofia Coppola goes to Graceland.

- ALISON WILLMORE

SOFIA COPPOLA MAKES films about sad, wealthy white women the way Martin Scorsese makes movies about gangsters-not with anywhere near the consistency of the version of the filmmaker that exists in the public's imagination. The Lisbon sisters of her feature-film debut, The Virgin Suicides, were, pointedly, the daughters of a Grosse Pointe math teacher and his wife, regular suburban girls elevated to mythic in the memories of the boys who idolized them from afar. The teens in The Bling Ring live in a universe parallel to the celebrities whose existences they covet. The schoolteachers and students of The Beguiled cling to their class status only through an act of will, performing gentility like a ritual. Still, she's a Coppola who made her acting debut as an infant in her father's The Godfather and riled up Cannes by portraying Marie Antoinette as an overindulged adolescent. The temptation to reduce her work to rich-girl problems is always going to be irresistible to some, even if it's not fair.

It's more accurate to say that her films are about privilege without power. The positions and the luxuries her characters enjoy tend to come from their proximity to men able to bestow them-they're wives, or daughters, or objects and wellsprings of desire. She makes movies about women who are picked, who have been raised expecting to be treasured-their near-uniform whiteness is certainly entwined with all this and who have been affirmed in those beliefs, until they aren't. Coppola is our auteur of girlishness, and in her films, to be a girl is to be shielded by everything you don't know.