What are we looking at?
Sofia Coppola’s very first film.
Go lecture.
Young women trapped in gilded cages: that’s the theme that comes to mind when thinking about the films of Sofia Coppola. The Virgin Suicides starred five suburban sisters under ever-tightening parental lockdown. Lost in Translation found a rock photographer’s wife free yet adrift in a swank Tokyo hotel. Marie Antoinette made a subject of, well, Marie Antoinette, and Somewhere left its eleven-year-old daughter of a disaffected movie star with no choice but turn up on on her dad’s Chateau Marmont doorstep. Even now, the filmmaker completes work on The Bling Ring, whose titular clutch of teenagers find themselves driven to burgle the homes of Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, and other such luminaries, surely out of sheer ennui. But the most vicious expression of the signature Sofia Coppola setup came in her very first film, the 1998 short Lick the Star.
Why is this good news?
You’ve never seen this piece of film history before.