On the Rocks (2020)
Directed by Sofia Coppola
Faced with sudden doubts about her marriage, a young New York mother teams up with her larger-than-life playboy father to tail her husband.
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What critics compared On the Rocks to
Sofia Coppola—the artist behind sensory, melancholy wonderments like The Virgin Suicides , Lost in Translation, and The Beguiled —probably wouldn’t spring immediately to mind as a natural director for a talky New York relationship comedy.
Mirroring her use of Air in The Virgin Suicides and Lost in Translation , she steers the action along to cool electronic tracks by French synth band Phoenix (the director is married to frontman Thomas Mars), stirring in occasional jazz and pop standards.
As much as On the Rocks is a character piece that leans heavily on Coppola’s terrific script and equally great cast, she surrounds them with some amazing work by a crew who prove what a huge role they’ve played in what people have enjoyed about Coppola’s filmmaking, going all the way back to The Virgin Suicides in 1999.
She pulled me in with her gauzy debut of teen angst, “The Virgin Suicides” (1999) starring Kirsten Dunst, and cemented her status as a filmmaker to watch with her follow-up “Lost in Translation” (2003), a beguiling chapter of detachment and ennui abroad.
The director sets all her stories in hermetically sealed worlds of wealth and privilege, but her young characters have always been depicted as rare birds trapped in gilded cages – quite literally when it came to the housebound Lisbon sisters of The Virgin Suicides (1999).
Over the span of two decades, Sofia Coppola's directing career has delivered a wide variety of titles from “The Virgin Suicides” to “Lost In Translation.”
Sofia Coppola also did it much better in “On the Rocks,” and with less tourist vistas.
Even beyond his previous work with Coppola, there’s his familiarity with concierges, which recalls The Grand Budapest Hotel; his genial stalker-ish behaviour, like something out of Broken Flowers; and his ability to say just the right thing in even the most outré situation, as if he’d practiced it, Groundhog Day style.