‘Marc by Sofia’ Review: Coppola’s Friendly Look at a Fashion Titan Leaves Some of its Seams Showing [B-] Venice

Sofia Coppola’s Marc by Sofia could only ever have been made by Sofia Coppola. On paper it is a straightforward proposition: a celebrated filmmaker turns her camera on a celebrated designer. In practice it becomes something stranger and more elusive, not a definitive biography but a shimmering mosaic of friendship, fashion, and cultural memory. The film is Coppola’s first documentary, though it feels of a piece with her narrative work: steeped in surfaces, attuned to moods, and more interested in how things look and feel than in how they are built.

Coppola and Jacobs have been intertwined since the 1990s, when they first crossed paths in New York’s overlapping art and fashion circles. She has modeled for his campaigns, directed commercials for his Daisy fragrance, and has long been described as his muse. This personal closeness shapes every frame of the film. Coppola never pretends to be an outsider looking in. Instead, she positions herself as a participant, sometimes heard off-camera asking questions, sometimes stepping into the frame. The film’s title acknowledges that subjectivity outright: it is not simply Marc Jacobs, but Marc by Sofia, a portrait filtered through friendship.

The narrative follows Jacobs in the run-up to his Spring 2024 show, a surrealist presentation in which doll-like models strutted beneath Robert Therrien’s towering table-and-chair sculpture. Coppola captures Jacobs fussing over wigs, lashes, fabrics, and stagecraft, presenting the show as a “seven-minute piece of theater.” What we see is not the designer sketching in solitude but a consummate professional orchestrating a spectacle. The actual mechanics of design such as the sketching, the construction, the trial and error are left largely in shadow. Coppola is more interested in Jacobs as a cultural figure, a vessel of references and influences. That interest fuels the film’s most intoxicating passages.

Coppola, with editor Chad Sipkin, assembles a kaleidoscope of archival material: Jacobs’ Parsons student show, his infamous Grunge collection for Perry Ellis in 1992, his sixteen years at Louis Vuitton and the candy-colored collaborations with Takashi Murakami that redefined the brand’s image. Each memory is layered with Jacobs’ own voice, citing inspirations from Barbra Streisand to Liza Minnelli, from Andy Warhol to Bob Fosse. Coppola cuts rapidly, layering images into a pop scrapbook set to buoyant music. These montages are dazzling in their density and in their ability to link Jacobs’ work to a broader history of camp, performance, and feminine glamour.

At its best Marc by Sofia captures the inside of an artist’s mind, flickering with images, names, and half-formed ideas. Coppola structures the film not as a linear biography but as a collage of impressions, a rhythm of digressions and connections. This choice distinguishes the film from the pedestrian documentaries that too often flatten their subjects. She allows the film to think like Jacobs: associatively, impulsively, always moving.

And yet what feels liberating also feels evasive. The film offers tantalizing glimpses of Jacobs’ personal life: his closeness to his grandmother, his youthful escapes from a difficult home, but skims past the harder questions. There is little about his marriage, nothing about his struggles in the fashion business, no discussion of the empire that once bore his name in stores across the world. His years navigating the fashion industry during the AIDS crisis, his abrupt departure from Louis Vuitton, even the basic economics of his brand, go unaddressed. The film keeps returning to spectacle and style, to fleeting moments of color and sound. The intimacy Coppola captures is real but partial: it feels more like a conversation among friends than an attempt to probe or explain.

In this sense Marc by Sofia mirrors the very world it depicts. Fashion is dazzling, ephemeral, and endlessly self-referential, and Coppola’s film adopts the same qualities. It is an image of Jacobs that sparkles but refuses to resolve, a portrait defined more by surfaces than by depths. The closeness between filmmaker and subject, so valuable for warmth, also imposes limits. Coppola, unlike a more investigative documentarian, has no interest in pressing too far or in placing Jacobs within the harsher realities of the industry. What results is affectionate but incomplete, a glittering bauble that charms as much as it frustrates.

But to dismiss the film as superficial would miss its subtler achievement. Coppola has always been a director fascinated by the aesthetics of modern life, by the languid ennui of the privileged, the pastel worlds of femininity, and the intoxicating pull of pop culture. In Jacobs she has found a kindred spirit, another artist who turns cultural ephemera into lasting images. Marc by Sofia is less a documentary than a duet, a way of capturing the resonance between two sensibilities. Its pleasures are real: the swirl of archive, the sly humor of Jacobs’ voice, the spectacle of a show transformed into cinema. Its limitations are real too, but they are also, perhaps, intentional. Coppola is not trying to give us the definitive Marc Jacobs. She is giving us Marc as she sees him, as muse, collaborator, and friend.

The result is a film that is as stylish, flawed, and fleeting as the world it portrays. Viewers hoping for revelations may leave disappointed. But those attuned to Coppola’s sensibility will recognize the film as another entry in her ongoing exploration of beauty, surfaces, and the fragile intimacies of modern culture. In that respect the title might have been expanded even further: not just Marc by Sofia, but Sofia by Sofia as well.

Grade: B-

This review is from the 2025 Venice Film Festival where Marc by Sofia had its world premiere out of competition. There is no U.S. distribution at this time.