Film

Sofia Coppola’s films are suffused with the bittersweet inevitability of adolescence: a period of life that changes you irrevocably and comes with an in-built ending. Anyone who has studied History at high school knows the outcome of Marie Antoinette (2006). In The Virgin Suicides (1999), it’s right there in the title. This sense of languid doom has never been more apparent than in Coppola’s new biopic Priscilla (based on its subject’s own memoir, Elvis and Me (1985, with Sandra Harmon). We already know how this story ends – so the writer-director invites us to take the scenic route, emphasising texture and psychology over drama and causality.

The holidays are fast approaching, which means it’s time for Hollywood A-listers to adopt thick accents (and don even thicker prosthetics) to re-enact the lives of historical celebrities in the pursuit of awards season glory. This year alone, we have had Oppenheimer and Napoleon and are staring down the barrel of Ferrari, Priscilla, Rustin, and Bob Marley: One Love, each promising to grapple with the challenge of effectively capturing an entire human life in the span of two multiplex-friendly hours (and in a manner sanctioned by their subjects’ estates and living relatives).

Ridley Scott’s Napoleon Bonaparte is petulant, over-confident. He likes to make animal noises and is often ill at ease. He is deeply infatuated with his wife. He can fall asleep at crucial moments. His ambitions are boundless, his limitations often comical. He’s very into cannons. He combines the extraordinary and the extremely ordinary in disconcerting ways.

In Martin Amis’s novel The Zone of Interest (2014), Auschwitz Commandant Paul Doll asserts that to meet the objectives of the Reich it is necessary to ‘shut down a certain zone of the mind. I must accept that we have mobilised the weapons, the wonder weapons, of darkness.’ Doll is not a man seeking to absolve himself. Rather, he attempts to explain his dilemma, lamenting not so much the moral nightmare into which he has been thrust, but the bureaucratic one: how to balance the Reich’s need to exploit the prisoners for their labour with the desire to eradicate them as quickly and efficiently possible? ‘The Christian system of right and wrong, of good and bad,’ he muses, ‘is 1 we categorically reject … There are only positive outcomes and negative outcomes.’

According to the Palestinian-American literary critic Edward Said, when some artists, musicians, and writers enter the last period of their lives, the sense of their own ending (whether from old age or ill health) occasions a change in their craft, a kind of ‘new idiom’ that he calls ‘late style’. While we might intuitively tend to think of old age bringing a sense of ‘reconciliation and serenity’, of ‘harmony and resolution’ to an artist’s portfolio, Said is more interested in those artists for whom the end actually marks a turning point, a shift towards ‘intransigence, difficulty and contradiction’.

Sometimes, through no deliberate strategy on the creators’ part, a film taps the Zeitgeist and takes off. Writer-director Noora Niasari’s début feature, Shayda, a very personal film that explores the courage and resilience of an Iranian woman escaping domestic violence in Melbourne, was already in post-production in September 2022 when the women-led uprising erupted in Iran, after the killing of Mahsa Amini by the morality police known officially as the Guidance Patrol.