Structured across four densely referenced chapters, the author commences by addressing the issue of Coppola’s heritage and its implications for her position in the cultural imaginary. Handyside’s previous work seems to lead logically to this destination, a study of the most fascinating woman director currently making films dedicated to the experience of the girl in the twenty-first century. This crossover area has been steadily growing, starting perhaps with the groundbreaking work of Angela McRobbie but part of film studies proper particularly since a 2002 collection of essays edited by Frances Gateward and Murray Pomerance. The field of girlhood studies has fertile ground to explore in terms of cinema and the oeuvre of Coppola is fascinatingly generative, a manifestation of empowering feminine pursuits masterfully embodied by Marie Antoinette (2006), a film which is much more than a paean to Ladurée macarons, despite its detractors.
The hypervisibility of girls in the culture prompts this lively exploration of this very contemporary auteur. Fiona Handyside’s book seeks to position Coppola as a distinctive auteur within a discourse that expands upon notions of feminism which nonetheless exhibits supposedly paradoxical tropes and interests that appear antithetical to female empowerment. In this original study, Handyside brings critical attention to a rare female auteur and in so doing contributes to important analyses of post-feminism, authorship in film, and the growing field of girlhood studies.What fascinates the observer about Sofia Coppola is not merely her parentage but the fact that she has created such an individual cinematic imprint – a focus on not merely female stories but the feminine, in what can be read as an affective cinema about girlhood in an era of postfeminism which privileges girlish experience. These characters inhabit luminous worlds of girlish adornments, light and sparkle and yet find homes in unexpected places from hotels to swimming pools, palaces to strip clubs: resisting stereotypes and the ordinary. Chapters reveal a post-feminist aesthetic that offers sustained, intimate engagements with female characters. Fiona Handyside here considers the careful counter-balance of vulnerability with the possibilities and pleasures of being female in Coppola's films - albeit for the white and the privileged - through their recurrent themes of girlhood, fame, power, sex and celebrity. From The Virgin Suicides to The Bling Ring, her work carves out new spaces for the expression of female subjectivity that embraces rather than rejects femininity.
She has received numerous accolades including an Academy Award and two Golden Globes, and in 2004 became the first ever American woman to be nominated for a Best Director Oscar.
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