Image Credit: Merrick Morton
I’m writing my first post here at Cannes while I sit at one of my favorite side-street bistros, digging into a bowl of spaghetti carbonara, which is somehow less fattening than it would be in the U.S., because there are so many less additives in European food. That’s kind of how I feel about Sofia Coppola’s filmmaking: It’s additive-free — a series of simple and direct gazes, purged of the usual syrup and glop, though maybe I should add that it’s deceptively simple, because the way that Coppola now works is to take her refreshingly unhurried, open-eyed, and empathetic camera style (which doesn’t descend from her father’s; I’d say it’s closer to Jonathan Demme meets mumblecore) and apply it to subjects of over-the-top extravagance. She first embraced this mode in Marie Antoinette (2006), and now, in her acerbically witty and arresting fifth feature, The Bling Ring, which premiered this morning at Cannes, she pushes it into the docudrama terrain of an American youth culture gone mad. READ FULL STORY »
