Marc Jacobs wears terrific pajamas, as you might expect: comfortably loose but crisply shaped, in a sort of metallic jacquard more typically seen on expensive upholstery, with creases that suggest they’re either box-fresh or newly ironed, but not heavily slept in. We see quite a lot of them on camera in “Marc by Sofia,” Sofia Coppola‘s laidback documentary portrait of the New York fashion designer, and whether or not they’re typical of his daytime attire, they seem a telling tonal marker for the project as a whole: Relaxed comfort is the order of the day, as befits a doc that mostly amounts to filmed conversation between two longtime friends. “Marc by Sofia” isn’t particularly penetrating or eye-opening on Jacobs as an artist, businessman or human being, but it is a pleasant and casually glamorous hang.
Premiering out of competition at Venice, this A24-backed title arguably has more to offer couture nerds than it does to Coppola acolytes. Though its status as the director’s first nonfiction feature gives it a certain novelty interest, it’s a modest and conventionally constructed work, not especially marked by her signature stylistic textures, despite the authorial suggestion of the title. Which is to say she largely lets the tone and tenor of proceedings be led by Jacobs himself, a brash and garrulous presence as unquiet as his typically angular, expressive designs. In another life, he tells her, he’d like to be a theater director, an occupation he feels calls on a similar skill set to his own, particularly when it comes to staging fashion shows: One way or another, he’s accustomed to calling the shots.
The build-up to one such show gives this lightly constructed film a rough framework, as Coppola sits in on planning and prep sessions for the reveal of Jacobs’ Spring 2024 collection — a witty, spangly range that mixes Supremes-referencing Sixties styling with such contemporary eccentricities as exuberantly oversized shorts in a near inflatable-looking synthetic fabric.
Unlike in certain previous docs similarly built around couture seasons, like Frédéric Tcheng’s standard-setting “Dior and I,” the collection in question isn’t especially high-stakes or game-changing: Jacobs isn’t starting a new creative chapter. That’s no bad thing, since the film affords us the pleasures of watching a fashion giant fully in his element, doing what he does best, and the sheer antsy high he gets merely from being at work is palpable.
In between checking in on the new collection’s progress, the film offers a fairly cursory overview of Jacobs’ career to date, beginning with his graduation from New York’s Parsons School of Design in the mid-Eighties. (Archival footage of a catwalk show featuring the deliberately bobbly knitwear creations that won him Design Student of the Year is a treasurable inclusion.) We pass through his early years as a womenswear designer for Perry Ellis, and the contentious early-Nineties “grunge” collection for the brand that, it is popularly believed, got him fired — not entirely the truth, he says, though he prefers that narrative.
His friendship with Coppola, then still a model and fashion it-girl, picks up around that point. Her appointment in 2001 as the face of his house fragrance Daisy isn’t expressly discussed by the two, though a fragment of that advertising campaign is included in one of several whirling, moodboard-style montages that mix snippets of Jacobs’ professional portfolio with his influences and idols, who range from Cindy Sherman to Elizabeth Taylor to Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
He’s most effusive when talking not about his own work but his inspirations, be they celebrities or the doting, style-conscious grandmother who mostly raised him after his father died and his mother remarried. The first film he remembers seeing is “Hello, Dolly!”: He had an early affinity for camp, while the choreography and styling of Bob Fosse’s work, he says, has left an enduring imprint on his own.
Such discussion is engaging, if mostly a bit surface-level: It’s hardly surprising that Coppola, herself a reticent and publicity-shy figure, is not the most pressing of interviewers. But the film benefits from the evident warmth and ease that Jacobs feels in her company, while other talking heads — among them Jacobs’ creative director Joseph Carter and former Vogue doyenne Grace Coddington — provide some welcome outside perspective.
Still, Jacobs is the film’s forcefield, and as we approach the rather radiant climax of his eventual show, we tune into his nerves, his adrenalin and his eventual sense of triumph. “Post-art-done,” a strained play on “postpartum,” is how he describes the immediate sense of comedown after having created such a thing, until he gets busy designing once more. By no means a major work, “Marc by Sofia” might not leave either its director or subject with a similar sensation, but it’s a breezy, mutually affectionate collaboration just the same.
variety.com
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