Sofia Coppola, Marc Jacobs, and 30 years of friendship between them––this triad was promising enough for A24 to jump on the project and for the Venice Film Festival to host its world premiere (out of competition). Where else if not Italy does a big director show their fashion documentary for the first time? Luca Guadagnino did (Salvatore, Shoemaker of Dreams) well knowing it would go straight to streaming after. Yet the subgenre of fashion documentary portraits has an honesty to it, wearing its formulaic structure, talking heads, and fast-paced supercut editing to match a predictable, zippy rhythm. Fame, beauty, a ruthless industry where one can either be great or good––all those are tropes that sell, but when Sofia Coppola is making such a film about designer Marc Jacobs and his A/W 2024/25 collection, it’s supposedly much more than a well-calculated commission.
One would expect a plethora of shared memories told with the intimacy of an inside joke, laughter; perhaps even tougher personal questions to paint the singular portrait of Jacobs that only someone who knows him very well could. If that someone happens to be a filmmaker with Coppola’s sensibility, you’d hope for some of the melancholic pizzazz that colors every project she directs. But Marc Jacobs brings the melancholic pizzazz himself while Coppola feels more comfortable in the role of an interviewer who prods very little, knowing their interviewee doesn’t need it.
Only some of Coppola’s prompts and questions are included for us to hear, but it’s hard to believe Jacobs isn’t being shepherded into mentioning cinema and films as inspirations. When he talks about Bob Fosse, Barbara Streisand, Hello Dolly, or The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, he is genuinely enthused, but less precise about what exactly inspires him about these films than when, for example, he mentions photographic work, music, or visual art. Without a proper grounding logic, the topic of cinema evokes a “Four Favorites with Marc Jacobs” (Letterboxd: take notes!) instead of, for example, discussing the designer’s own experience acting in the 2012 feature Disconnect alongside Andrea Riseborough and Alexander Skarsgard. It could have been at least a little intriguing to see what a designer whose shows are famously avant-garde, conceptual, and cinematic has to say, sitting in the hot chair, about being on a movie set where someone else makes the rules––surely Coppola might have a few things to say on being a director as well.
Narratively, Coppola’s documentary could have afforded to rattle the rigid structure of “life-story-in-the-lead-up-to-Fashion-Week” and chosen a different framework to tell the story of Marc Jacobs––the myth, the deadline-driven visionary who fears the beginning of each task, the self-made man. Marc by Sofia––particularly when observing Jacobs in his natural habitat (four weeks before a show) as he exhales a modest amount of vape smoke––is actually a viewing experience so pleasant that it gives the impression that you might even get along him. An agreeable documentary with technically zero drama (and notably no other interviewees) portraying a hard-working icon of street-wise aesthetic and a radical influence on high fashion: what’s the catch? Arguably there isn’t one, but it’s hard to say whether the balminess of the film is a result of a friendly disposition, or if Coppola’s auteurist touch is way too light.
Marc by Sofia premiered at the 2025 Venice Film Festival.
The post Venice Review: Marc by Sofia is an Agreeable Documentary Portrait Lacking Intimacy first appeared on The Film Stage.
from The Film Stage https://ift.tt/04g63mi
0 Comments