Hipster documentary Marc by Sofia records fame and privilege in these times.
Fashion designer Marc Jacobs first befriended Sofia Coppola at his 1993 “grunge” show, where her mother arranged for the pair to be introduced. Since then, Jacobs has been Sofia’s pal and muse, leading to her first documentary, Marc by Sofia. The title plays off each one’s entrepreneurial skills and name as a brand.
Sofia branded herself for the hipster American Eccentric independent-film movement, distaff division. After The Virgin Suicides (1999), Sofia’s feature-fiction directorial debut, her films became marked by self-absorbed introspection on all things cosseted and female. Her work isn’t “feminist” according to any political standard, which is why this mash-up with Jacobs (on a first-name basis) avoids any polemical statements or personal inquiry.
Marc by Sofia chronicles Jacobs as he prepares his Spring 2024 collection, while Sofia captures cinema vérité moments of him discussing fabrics and runway presentation with his staff, sprinkling in clips from his career. The superficial narrative broadens Sofia’s own résumé of filmmaking techniques that keeps her at the vanguard of American women film directors. (No small achievement so soon after the disasters of Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights and Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride!) Her mother, Eleanor Coppola, wife and helpmate to Francis Ford Coppola, made better films than Sofia (Paris Can Wait, Love Is Love Is Love), but a middle-aged woman is not a marketable commodity in Brat culture.
When Sofia comes from behind the camera to canoodle with Jacobs and recall their introduction (a clapboard is visible, featuring the name of her brother Roman Coppola, cameraman and assistant), the moment captures more than designer and director camaraderie; it epitomizes the unique generational privilege that post-Kardashian Millennials take for granted.
This isn’t simple celebrity worship or self-idolization. Sofia approaches the documentary as naïvely as she previously tackled other genres: family melodrama (The Virgin Suicides); existential travelogue (Lost in Translation); romantic fantasy (Marie Antoinette); Hollywood exposé (Somewhere); Hollywood exposé part 2 (The Bling Ring); historical gothic (The Beguiled), the Electra complex (On the Rocks), and the biopic (Priscilla). No matter the topic, the subject always comes back to Sofia and her unabashed daddy’s-girl view of the world.
Identifying with Jacobs, Sofia becomes that boy-girl ally who shares interest in clothes, music, art, and fame. No private slumber-party diary secrets are disclosed. But close viewing reveals the essence of their rapport in the way Jacobs expresses himself via his own prima donna image — a blue fingernail manicure, a coiffure highlighted by neatly arranged hair clips. (When Jacobs pays his debt to his alma mater, the Parsons School of Design, by meeting student aspirants, we see that same hairdo that Jacobs either copied or perhaps inspired. It seems Sofia doesn’t notice.)
Jacobs complements Sofia’s dilettante response to pop culture in his own design ideas. Their shared enthusiasm for movies is a highlight. Of the film professionals Jacobs most admires, his adoration of Elizabeth Taylor inspires a clip from A Place in the Sun, and Bob Fosse’s impact on staging and runway movement is verified by clips of the “Hey Big Spender” number from Sweet Charity. Sofia justifies the risk of alluding to movies she cannot possibly match because the scenes themselves (including a clip from Hello, Dolly!) are breathtaking — the kind of cinema we don’t see anymore.
Sofia’s career epitomizes nepo-baby privilege, but like Jacobs, her borrowing is up-front and honest and sometimes evinces a genuinely tasteful response — whether it’s the pop music soundtrack of The Virgin Suicides or the cultural detritus that memorializes the Elvis-era mania in Priscilla. (Her filmography outclasses Greta Gerwig’s Barbie. Had Sofia directed that, it might have been personal rather than asinine.)
For an admitted clothes maven, if not exactly a fashionista, Sofia never looks at Jacobs in terms of the business or aesthetics that made Frédéric Tcheng’s Dior and I, about designer Raf Simons, so compelling. (Sofia should have studied Jacobs for “a way to just be a man,” as Morrissey did in the lyrics of his stirring paean “Christian Dior.”) Reviewers customarily ignore and defend Sofia’s frivolity, but it’s inexcusable when she sashays by Jacobs’s homage to Diana Ross in his 2024 collection without examining the puffy, Negro Big Hair details on display at the Park Avenue Armory.
Not even Werner Herzog dared to put his own name in a title when he paid tribute to his muse, Klaus Kinski, in My Best Fiend. Documentarian Sofia merely lets Jacobs vamp, such as name-dropping artist Robert Therrien’s oversized furniture sculptures for the Armory presentation. Seeing the platoons of big-hair models prance and strut underneath Therrien’s large structures explains the Marc and Sofia friendship better than the duo intended: They play in the worlds of fashion and movies like kids living in a dollhouse.
