A new documentary by Sofia Coppoli was shown at the Venice Film Festival. Film critic Natalya Serebryakova marveled at this documentary conversation between two people and shared enemies.
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It would seem that Sofia Coppoli's documentary about Marc Jacobs is a portrait of a celebrity, the evidence of archival footage and insights, knowledge for the high school stake of fashion slickers. But in truth, this robot appears to be richly folded and useful – this is a dialogue of two mitts, which have been going on for over thirty years in a wonderful creative symbiosis, in the cohesive “we” generation, like grew up on grunge, MTV and fashion as a universal cultural culture.
Sofia and Mark were already focused on the beginning of the 1990s, when the aesthetics of punk basements and subcultures began to transform into a global style. She then knew the director and actor Spike Jonze and directed performative shows on the sidewalks of New York, and she had already created her legendary “grunge collection” for Perry Ellis, when the world of fashion began to wear down its shoulders, and then became icon. From this point began her invisible story – about fashion as cinema and about cinema as fashion.
Coppola herself is trying to catch something from “Marc by Sofia”. This camera not only captures, but also understands: Sofia appears in the frame every hour, sets the clarification of the food, and never gains respect for herself. Vaughn listens with respect to how Jacobs recalls his painful childhood, talks about the loss of his father and the disintegration of his family, and at this point it is important not to draw parallels with the heavy autobiographical notes in his films – here “Nezaymani-samogubtsi” to “Des”.
The documentary will be like a confession from a mirror. Jacobs admits: “I always wanted to be a theater director,” and Coppola echoes: “I always wanted to make clothes.” Their mutual love of mutes mirrors one another, creating space between fashion and cinema. And in this mirror one can see the key to Coppoli’s poetics: these lines have always tried to capture the mood of the era, to give the style and image a special meaning.
A film of structuring in the process of creating the spring-summer 2024 rock collection. Mi bachimo Jacobs at the moment of doubt, tension and depression after the show. Whose has a deep existentialism: a demonstration of how creativity simultaneously ignites and ruins a person.
At the same time, “Marc by Sofia” is no less than a biographical drawing. This is a kind of cultural map of a generation. Phantoms of influences appear on the screen: from Yves Saint Laurent and Vivian Westwood to Bob Fosse and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Coppola shows lessons from the Great Sloth of Petri von Kant, “Cabaret”, “The Great Jazz” and “La Charity”, emphasizing how the very cinematic images imprinted on the patterns of the clothes, the colors of the fabrics and the set design of Jacobs’s shows.
The page “Marc by Sofia” is not just a story about the designer. This is a tender, perhaps intimate, declaration from the director herself: about friendship, about mutual understanding, about the generation that has begun to work with the aesthetics of my own composition.
The result before us is not a typical documentary portrait, but something closer to a “two-person self-portrait.” Coppola filters Jacobs's story through heavy-handed film-poetics, and we pick out a different image: a director who was always good at stylized speech, and a designer who turned her life into fashion. Not forever more innovative, but always better than cinema. And, perhaps, the most accurate way to describe it is to call it a “documentary love story,” as Sofia Coppola writes not about a person, but rather about a relationship that has been going on for three decades.
