The Coppola renaissance

The film world is strewn with the ruined reputations of sons and daughters of Hollywood royalty who have tried to follow in their parents' footsteps. The results have rarely been pretty - just ask Charlie Sheen. But now there is Sofia Coppola.

Even before her new film Lost in Translation opened in the US last month, the 32-year-old daughter of Francis Ford Coppola was being lauded as one of the brightest young directors in America.

Reviews of the movie, which stars Bill Murray and 18-year-old hotly tipped newcomer Scarlett Johansson, have showered Coppola with praise for her subtlety of sensibility and mood and begun to talk loudly about an Oscar nomination for 54-year-old Murray.

"Entrancing ... improbably romantic ... wonderfully performed" scream the notices. The Wall Street Journal pronounced: "It's great to see Sofia Coppola adding lustre to her family's name, but greater still to see her searching out a sense of humanity that's in desperately short supply, both in modern life and contemporary movies.''

With this film, Coppola has more than bucked the trend of Hollywood nepotism - she has been placed at the forefront of a new generation of US filmmakers such as Wes Anderson, Thomas Paul Anderson, David Gordon Green and her husband, Spike Jonze, who are making films that are, in their own way, as compelling and different as those made by her father's generation of auteur directors - the Raging Bulls of the Seventies. But this is cinema on a small scale: darkly funny and disarmingly honest films that focus on touching and painful human relationships.

While the new breed may not display the same muscularity as Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets, Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter and Coppola's Godfather trilogy, they are nonetheless equally refreshing. Films like Lost In Translation, Rushmore, All The Real Girls and Adaptation speak of a rejection of the status quo without the bombast.

Coppola seems quietly pleased by the attention. "I'm used to people not expecting much from me," she said recently. "Being underestimated is, in a way, a kind of advantage because people are usually pleasantly surprised by the result.''

Her sense of calm obviously comes across on the set, where she is said to be less dictatorial than her father. "Don't let Sofia's littleness and quietness confuse you,'' says Bill Murray. "Sophia is tough, she is made of steel, but she doesn't pretend to be a man. She has a way of getting her way, she's very polite about it. When you see her movies you forget that she is Francis's daughter. She has been able to reinvent what her last name represents.''

And that originality seems to be what has propelled her to the top of the critics' list. "People are waiting for the next renaissance of American film but it's not going to come along with the same force as it did in the early Seventies," says Glenn Kenny, of Premiere magazine. "This is a quiet renaissance and these directors represent the most encouraging trend seen in American cinema in years."

More concerned with the delicacy and ambiguity of human relations, Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation stole the show at both the Venice and Toronto film festivals. It concerns Bob Harris (Murray), a down-at-heel, unhappily married actor who is in Tokyo to make a whisky commercial. Adrift in a vast hotel, suffering from jet lag and the dislocation of being in a land of strange customs where little or nothing can be understood, he forms a friendship with Charlotte (Johansson), who is equally at sea in Tokyo and with herself. The pair set off on a series of often-hilarious capers that bring them into a romance that's, well, lost in translation.