Some Thoughts on New Hollywood Multiplicity: Sofia Coppola’s Young Girls Trilogy

Abstract

Sofia Coppola was born while her father, Francis Ford Coppola, was making The Godfather (1972), and her birth was celebrated during the production, if only by the indirectness of a ceremony elaborately staged in the film itself: a baptism, that most sacred of beginnings that also unites the family into which the newborn is to be welcomed. In that ceremony, Sofia “plays” the part of Michael’s newborn godson, Michael Rizzi, the son of Connie Corleone Rizzi (Talia Shire) and her husband Carlo (Gianni Russo). The baptism marks a significant moment of continuing family solidarity, but it is also a ruse designed to establish an alibi for Michael Corleone, whose “soldiers” are murdering the family’s enemies as the time-honored ritual proceeds, establishing a lifetime bond between the baby and his uncle, who is also a godfather in a larger sense. This uniting of the generations is one of the ways in which The Godfather offers a profound meditation on the complexities of the family as the most elemental and indispensable of social forms.