Sofia Coppola portrays Marc Jacobs as a blank canvas

Buddy movies are usually either the best occasion for tremendous confessions or a nice excuse for simple propaganda. And then there's what Sofia Coppola presented a few days ago in Venice about her friend, the designer and fashion icon Marc Jacobs. There's absolutely nothing that can't be traced on Wikipedia and the surrounding area (check), but the film manages to make it almost unnoticeable. More than hagiography, which it has something of, Marc by Sofia, as it's called, is closer to simple pleonasm. And this desire, let's put it this way, to be nothing but nothing ends up being precisely its salvation. It seems as if the director adopts something of the attitude of the characters in many of her films in general and in The Bling Ring in particular to offer a kind of intimate, relaxed, and always elegant (of course), but so passionately inconsequential that it ends up elevating yawning to the category of fine art. In fact, never have so many freshly ironed pajamas been seen in a movie.

Despite what one might deduce from the title, the documentary bears no trace of authorship, style, or even a signature. Putting the two names together on the poster is just propaganda. Coppola is there, and in fact, he gives away a couple of shots, but the purest orthodoxy guides what amounts to nothing more than a conversation tied to a talking head. Everything is capitalized on by a very talkative Jacobs as he prepares last year's Spring collection where, as he explains, the sixties merge with rabidly electric screams. Or something like that, as the indecisive poet would say.

The camera, not so much Sofia herself, starts from the present and goes as far back as possible, to when the person portrayed was a child in love with his grandmother, to whom he claims to owe so much. We see a brief summary of the designer's career, starting with his graduation from Parsons School of Design in New York in the mid-1980s and then his early years as a designer for Perry Ellis. Suddenly, perhaps as the only revelation for those who are very coffee-loving, the archive images with the faded colors of the previous video offer the ghosts (that's what they are) of a first fashion show featuring knitted creations with pom-poms that earned Jacobs the Design Student of the Year award. And all this without forgetting the episode that stands out in any self-respecting biography, involving the controversial grunge collection that, in the early 1990s, earned him, or so they say, dismissal from the aforementioned firm.

For those unversed in the subject, the most interesting part concerns the sources of inspiration and the reflection (or almost) that the creator proposes on how to interpret camp in life and in his work. Not far from the classic reading of Susan Sontag, Jacobs insists before Coppola's camera on the fascinating power of that sensibility that sees everything in quotation marks and, therefore, transforms the world into representation, into pure theater. The references to Elizabeth Taylor, Barbra Streisand, Cindy Sherman, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder do the rest. Jacobs confesses (so to speak) that the first film he ever saw was Hello, Dolly , and, in a simple fragment of the prodigy directed by Gene Kelly, we glimpse a world, Jacobs's world.

What remains is something like a portrait not on a blank canvas, but a blank canvas that is a portrait. There's some nerves about the collection, a little adrenaline, and the occasional rush, but the important thing is that it doesn't show. Nothing shows in a film designed for the most glorious inconsequentiality. The words "posh" or "posh" aren't worth saying.