AN AUTEUR OF DECADENCE: SOFIA COPPOLA AND THE UNBEARABLE HEAVINESS OF COMING OF AGE

As a filmmaker, Sofia Coppola is often under critiques considering her visual excess frivolous. This article is an auteur study towards the thematic and stylistic tendencies of Sofia Coppola’s films. Through analysis of her mise-en-scene, I contend that Coppola, as a film auteur, tends to glorify the image of the lost generation. This glorification is bolstered by her signature style that echoes the spirit of the Decadent movement in the late-nineteenthcentury European art scenes, which was preoccupied with the idea of fin de siècle or society in transition at the end of time. This idea is exemplified most vividly by motifs such as hedonistic behavior, visual excess, and cultural decline.


INTRODUCTION
. As a director who came from a privileged upbringing, there is a popular debate stemming from the clear connection between Coppola's works and her life. As a film critic of Indiewire pointed out, "Although she's hardly the only filmmaker to come from wealth, Coppola has been uniquely diligent --or, if you will, obsessive --in making that privilege the subject of her movies" (Adams & Adams, 2013).
The recurrent criticism toward the connection between her films and her upper-class upbringing indicates a popular and misleading view on how the auteur label is rightly justified from an autobiographical reading. The highly selfconscious way Coppola's films refer to the privileged world is so striking that it made a film critic of Libération writes, "Cinema is for Coppola a mirror in which she looks at herself, not a mirror she holds to the world" (Poirier, 2006 (Reed, 1985). 209 to filmmaking practices where the director's signature was as much in evidence on the script/ scenario as it was on the film product itself" (Hayward, 2013). In Sofia Coppola's case, it manifests as her 'inner world' or la vie interieur which is best explained by Eric Rohmer as: Those sorts of sentiments which one loves to hide most deeply within oneself-not only repressed humiliation, but the disgust or the lassitude which one feels for oneself-that the audacity of such a subject can appear only after some reflection (as cited in Hess, 1974).

METHOD
The most frequently referred theory about auteur is Andrew Sarris's Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962Theory in (1962. Even  because of specific hallmarks, the film is ostensibly a certain filmmaker's and also influenced by that of others, etc" (Hayward, 2013

Rites-of-Passage Narrative as Motif of Liminality
In a particular scene towards the end of The Virgin Suicides (Coppola, 1999) The theme of liminality is also translated into Coppola's narrative space.
In The Bling Ring (Coppola, 2013), almost every celebrity house that the teen thieves break into is designed in the Bauhaus style.

Visual Excess and the Aesthetic of
Decadence "This, Madame, is Versailles" (Coppola, 2006). John R Reed (1985) describes the Decadence as an artistic method that is "highly self-conscious" and "may include a degree of self-mockery" by using technique of "dissolution and reconstruction" to depict "scenes of longing, aspiration, frustration, and despair".

Under the Camera Gaze: Sofia
Coppola's Self-Reflexivity "It's the idea that the phone has become everybody's camera and everybody's a photographer, and the immediacy of that is translated out into the public." (Prince, 2013)  Essentially, the implication is that Coppola 1) as a woman, only has the ability to make films because of her economic privilege, 2) only has whatever talent she does possess because of her all-powerful director/father, and 3) because her movies are feminine, can only produce pretty films that "lack depth" (Kennedy, 2010).
The criticism of "lack depth" primarily derives from Marie Antoinette's audience reception, which ironically is also one of Coppola's films that openly, "turns in on itself and speaks about its own artistic conventions and presuppositions" (Polan, 1974  within the system (Hollywood) to reveal its own artifice, or to quote Umberto Eco, "the Absolute Fake", that derives from the vacuum "of a present without depth" (Umberto Eco & Weaver, 1987).
A scene from Somewhere would be the best to describe this superficial notion. that "is extrapolated from the tension between a director's personality and his material".
In regard to her recurrent theme and style, the main tension of Coppola's films would be best described as an expressed anxiety towards the mediating process of representation in a prevailing hyperreal world. This predicament, in the very heart of her cinematic practice, is in line with the spirit of Decadence, which Reed (1985) illustrates as "(a) frustrated yearning after some unattainable image, ideal, or faith" where the inevitability of frustration may lead to "a melancholy of obsession with remoteness in space or time, especially with childhood" (1985).
The Virgin Suicides might be the best example to illustrate this spirit. The story of the Lisbon girls mediated by the gazes of neighbourhood's boys and ladies is an attempt to represent a childhood mystery as an unattainable truth. This is a mode of nostalgia used by the film to refer to an obsession towards an unattainable distant past, where the haunting music serves as a cue for a vague presence of melancholy. It is a kind of melancholy which mourns for the loss of any real connection between image and reality.