Filmmaker Sofia Coppola has become the first women since 1961 to win Cannes Film Festival’s Directing Prize.
You would have thought Coppola’s award- for her female-centric remake of 1971 civil war drama The Beguiled which starred Clint Eastwood- would generate widespread applause on social media given the fact she is an outspoken feminist and all the attention paid to the perceived under-representation of women directors at Cannes in recent years.
Not so. Even though Coppola’s movie stars a host of feminist actresses including Kirsten Dunst, Nicole Kidman and Elle Fanning, she is being slammed for supposedly having made a movie about rich white women.
The plot of the movie-a wounded Union soldier who takes refuge an all-female Southern boarding school during the Civil War- doesn’t immediately evoke an aura of white privilege. But Coppola is being torched on Twitter for promoting excessive whiteness in her movies:
As usual, the white elitist film critic establishment carries water for their darling Sofia Coppola. Keep drinking that Kool-Aid…
— Jef Bo$$tello (@LaszloBrovacs) May 28, 2017
I love that sofia coppola won best director at cannes but like come on tho a movie basically just about a bunch of white women?? 👎🏻
— 🦇🎎👺 (@rnacabre) May 28, 2017
A win for Sofia Coppola is a win for white supremacy
— Francisco Javier (@FrankieAram) May 24, 2017
Sofia Coppola’s new movie feels like she was just like “how can I possibly fit the largest number of skinny blond white women in this?”
— Emma Greenleaf (@EmmaGreenleaf) February 18, 2017
Coppola has previously been accused of racism in her films Lost in Translation and The Bling Ring.
This time people are objecting that a black character in the original 1971 movie The Beguiled (the slave Hallie played by Mae Mercer) hasn’t re-surfaced in Coppola’s loose remake.
Gotta hand it to Sofia Coppola: erasing the black character of Hallie in her Beguiled remake shows a real commitment to White Feminism™
— A-A-Ron Swanson (@coucouaaron) May 24, 2017
Coppola almost certainly isn’t being racist- she is instead a unique filmmaker whose cinematic vision maps to her own world rather than the real world going on outside her head.
But that’s not good enough for SJWs such as ‘Melonie’ who wrote a comment underneath a Variety article about The Beguiled: “Funny Coppola talks about sexism when her career is the result of nepotism and her movies are usually are about rarified worlds full of rich white people – but keep lying to yourself, Sofia.”
Expect more of all this when The Beguiled is released in cinemas late June.