Why the Sad Girl, Sofia? - The Beauty of Sad Femininity Through Sofia Coppola's Priscilla - by Emily Kim
- Feb 16, 2024
- 3 min read
Image Source: A24
Sofia Coppola’s newest movie, Priscilla, is a fragile watch, one that feels like fabric fraying on skin.
Following only a year after Baz Lurhman’s biopic Elvis, Coppola’s Priscilla chronicles Priscilla Presley’s marriage with Elvis and is based on the titular woman’s autobiography Elvis and Me. In the first ten minutes, we witness Priscilla’s first encounter with Elvis; by the last scene, we see Priscilla leaving him for good, ending their complicated, yet tender relationship.
Unlike the colorful chaos of Lurhman’s Elvis, which deifies the titular singer, enveloping him with glorious opulence in every frame, Priscilla feels glaringly lackluster in comparison. The beige walls and sheer curtains of Graceland–Elvis’s mansion–engulf the screen, capturing Elvis not as a dazzling superstar, but rather as a regular human being.
Produced by Priscilla Presley herself, Coppola’s film is a genuine and intimate retelling of Priscilla’s tumultuous time with Elvis. Starring Cailee Spaeny as Priscilla and Jacob Elordi as Elvis, their ten-year age gap is emphasized by the two actors’ gaping difference in height, with Elordi towering over Spaeny by about two feet.
In Elvis’s absence throughout the movie, we find Priscilla in suffocating solitude. Spaeney’s small figure and the quiet of Graceland (a quintessentially-50s carapace with an air of desolation) as Elvis is away leaves you feeling as nauseated, naked, and as melancholy as the star woman herself.
This visceral effect of “feminine sadness” that Coppola captures in Priscilla’s character is resonant all throughout her filmography, whether it be in her book-to-screen adaptation of The Virgin Suicides, the tragic story of the five Lisbon sisters; her original screenplay Lost in Translation, which is a meditation on quarter-life and mid-life crises; and Marie Antoinette, a fun yet sincere perspective on the former queen’s life.
Though wildly different in theme, genre, and cinematography, all of these films contain Coppola’s token “sad girl.”
The sad girl not only exists in Coppola’s films. In fact, the sad girl is everywhere. She’s the spirit of Lana Del Rey and Mitski’s music, the crux of the world’s trendiest aesthetics (coquette, lolita, dark academia, you name it), the allure of Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, and the Bronte sisters, and the epitome of what all angsty 13-year-olds want to be: tragically beautiful.
And to be able to express this pain that the female endures is, no doubt, a beautiful thing. Yet, at the same time, to make sadness “aesthetic” is to make it appealing and desirable, creating this standard that women should be sad, for that is what makes them alluring. So as the “sad girl” becomes trendier, so does the romanticization of mental illness and suicide, compelling girls of all ages to desire the image of depression and self-loathing.
Priscilla can make the “sad girl” contagion all the more enticing. As Priscilla weeps behind a door, sunlight seeping through the crack, just revealing the glistening tears she’s barely holding, you can’t help but be mystified by her beauty and composure, even as she’s tearing at the seams stitch by stitch.
Though this singular scene can whet the urge to cry with mascara streaming down your cheeks, Coppola’s works are not flat and narrow-minded in the way the sad girl aesthetic is. Her films portray femininity and sadness not as something two-dimensional, made solely for the visual appeal (as aesthetics frequently tend to do), but rather as something infinite in its complexity and, at its core, human.
Her depiction of the sad girl isn’t a still-life capturing gorgeously-posed women in despair, like photos you’d find on Pinterest, but rather a moving display that is true to the female experience. It is through her storytelling that she brings women to life, each film chronicling the universal ache that we feel from start to finish.
In other words, Coppola does not emulate or romanticize the sad girl; instead, she empathizes with her.
As Priscilla drives away from Graceland, permanently leaving the life that had confined her for so long, she travels beyond the picture-perfect frames that held her “sad girl” allure. With this chapter in her life complete and a new one to come, a smile draws upon her face and the credits begin to roll.
Works Cited
Comments