Sofia Coppola has always lived in the kind of cool girl universe where popular culture records your youth for you. Her “awkward” years were captured when she appeared in Sonic Youth’s 1991 music video Mildred Pierce. Her early interest in fashion was immortalised through her cult clothing line Milk Fed. Her ideas about girlhood were explored in films like Lick the Star and The Virgin Suicides. Even the demise of her young marriage to Spike Jonze resulted in the Oscar-winning Lost in Translation.
Or take Hi Octane, her short-lived, star-studded Comedy Central series created with her pal Zoe Cassavetes in 1994. In the arms of any other early twentysomething, that description could sound nightmarish. But like so much of the director’s later work, subjects that should be gnawing (the inner lives of the rich, beautiful and bored) are totally hypnotic.
