What Sofia Coppola’s films taught me about being a teenage girl

I remem­ber clear­ly those were worst years of my life – the five-year span from my 13^th birth­day up until my 18^th, when adult­hood beck­oned me for­ward with its crooked hand. I’m not sure I’ve ever been as unhap­py as I was as a teenag­er, when I was fat and ugly and friend­less. I was spi­ralling out of con­trol in any and every direc­tion, des­per­ate for an anchor to fix me to real­i­ty. I had a Sylvia Plath phase (what teenage girl doesn’t?) where I fan­ta­sised about death by car­bon monox­ide poi­son­ing, per­turbed by the fact we had an elec­tric oven rather than gas. But it was Plath that led me to Jef­frey Eugenides’ The Vir­gin Sui­cides, which in turn led me to Sofia Cop­po­la. When I found Cop­po­la, I found mean­ing in my misery.

The sub­ur­ban sprawl of Grosse Pointe, Michi­gan doesn’t have much in com­mon with the ex-coun­cil estate in York­shire that I grew up on – those dreamy Cop­po­la visu­als in The Vir­gin Sui­cides are a mil­lion miles away from the grim Loachi­an North I know (that’s not hyper­bole, my grand­ma went to school with the author of Kes). Yet while her set­ting pro­vid­ed escapism, the film entranced me – I saw myself in the Lis­bon girls, saw myself in Cecil­ia lying in her hos­pi­tal bed, who when asked how she could know how bad life gets replies ​“Obvi­ous­ly doc­tor, you’ve nev­er been a 13-year-old girl.”

There’s a unique wretched­ness in trans­form­ing from a child to an adult, and some of us look to film to trans­late our emo­tions into some­thing we can expe­ri­ence with our sens­es. In The Vir­gin Sui­cides I saw so clear­ly my despon­dent iner­tia look­ing back at me – how boys were for­eign enti­ties, how I longed for free­dom while simul­ta­ne­ous­ly being ter­ri­fied of it, how des­per­ate­ly, deeply unhap­py I was, with seem­ing­ly no deep­er expla­na­tion. I found cathar­sis in Coppola’s mut­ed melan­choly and a sense of sis­ter­hood in know­ing I was not alone. If it sounds triv­ial, it’s because it is – teenagers are triv­ial and tran­si­to­ry, caught between two vast­ly dif­fer­ent worlds.

No teenag­er exudes triv­i­al­i­ty on such a grand scale as Marie Antoinette, played by Kirsten Dun­st in Coppola’s 2006 biopic. Whilse the film divid­ed audi­ences due to its his­tor­i­cal inac­cu­ra­cies, con­tem­po­rary sound­track and appar­ent vac­u­ous­ness, Coppola’s film suc­ceeds as a medi­a­tion on ado­les­cence. Dun­st plays the teen queen with a famil­iar brat­ty vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty, all at once trag­ic and ter­ri­ble and hope­less­ly human, no longer a por­trait on a wall but a liv­ing, breath­ing teenage girl. Like ado­les­cence itself, the film sings with colour and noise and light and sad­ness, and it’s this gid­di­ness that enthralled a 16-year-old me.

Per­haps it’s the lack of pre­tence that so attract­ed me to these par­tic­u­lar Cop­po­la films, which set their stalls out so clear­ly – death is an inevitabil­i­ty for the Lis­bons as much as it is Marie Antoinette, but the sto­ries Cop­po­la tells brim with life, beau­ty and noise. The inter­net has ensured I can nev­er for­get the ter­ri­ble fash­ion choic­es I made as a teenag­er – I was nowhere near as well put-togeth­er as a Cop­po­la girl, but I saw myself in her films’ eclec­tic sound­tracks. In par­tic­u­lar her use of Heart’s Mag­ic Man to accom­pa­ny nineties heart­throb Josh Hartnett’s entrance in The Vir­gin Sui­cides is a stroke of genius, evok­ing mem­o­ries of those count­less school nights spent replay­ing that one song that remind­ed you of your crush.

When I look back at Coppola’s films now, some­thing strikes me that nev­er crossed my mind when I watched them for the first time: they are cen­tred on the rela­tion­ships between teenage girls and the men in their lives – their fathers, their friends, their lovers. In The Vir­gin Sui­cides, the sto­ry is nar­rat­ed by the teenage boys who vague­ly knew the Lis­bon sis­ters, and have been haunt­ed by their sui­cides ever since.

We see the Lis­bon sis­ters through the ever-present male gaze, and the inva­sion of their per­son­al space is a recur­ring theme, as the teenage boys spy on them from afar, and steal Cecilia’s diary after her sui­cide in order to bet­ter under­stand her frame of mind. They spec­u­late and con­jec­ture about the girls they so longed to get close to, but ulti­mate­ly can nev­er have. ​“We felt the impris­on­ment of being a teenage girl,” says Gio­van­ni Ribisi’s nar­ra­tor – and I felt it too in Marie Antoinette, whose life was dic­tat­ed by the rule of men, and her auton­o­my found in the form of excess as rebellion.

What Cop­po­la cap­tures in her films is the unique feel­ing of teenage entrap­ment and des­per­a­tion in all its forms – from the melan­choly of the Lis­bon sis­ters to Marie Antoinette’s ado­les­cent rever­ie – but also the capri­cious, elec­tri­fy­ing pow­er of youth. Every­thing moves both too fast and ago­nis­ing­ly slow when you’re a teenage girl, and the weight of the world yours alone to car­ry. No one under­stands this unique pow­er and pain bet­ter than Sofia Coppola.