Director

Gia Coppola

United States | 2020 | 95 min | English

• Producer Fred Berger, Michael Musante, Gia Coppola, Siena Oberman, Jack Heller, Enrico Saraiva, Francisco Rebelo de Andrade, Alan Terpins, Andrew Garfield, Zac Weinstein
• Production Company Automatik, American Zoetrope, Artemis, Assemble, Tugawood
• Screenplay Tom Stuart, Gia Coppola
• Cinematography Autumn Durald Arkapaw
• Editing Glen Scantlebury
• Sound Pete Horner
• Cast Andrew Garfield, Maya Hawke, Nat Wolff, Jason Schwartzman, Alexa Demie, Johnny Knoxville
• Contacts

  Wild Bunch International

  edevos@wildbunch.eu

About the Film

Frankie is a lonely person who has suffered successive losses since her father was killed in a car accident. What is ‘mainstream’ about Frankie's world? It is the craze of the Internet, social media and its arms, where everyone falls victim to public vanity, false ambition, common fraud, and hidden submission to organized propaganda and its monsters.

We meet Frankie as a waitress in a magic-themed lounge bar, and its name bears the cinematic connotation of an illusion that leads her in the direction of her final stumbling block. It is represented by her occasional encounters with a young man called Link, an encoding of the word ‘connection’ for the Internet and mobile phones. Link is a strange and mysterious, but lively and brilliant person who dresses as animals and insects. The heroine describes him with a wish-like question: "Is this a rat, or a prince waiting for someone to accept him?"

Living in Los Angeles with its peculiarities and false paradise, Frankie is Cinderella among her peers who are looking for a social or emotional connection, or a victory in attracting the interest of the opposite sex, but through cyber channels—spiritless and without moral scruples.

In Mainstream, which comes seven years after her famous Palo Alto, Coppola creates an ethereal world full of speed, music, shows and overlapping scenes, images and sounds.

This is in addition to a large crowd of dialogical interpretations about the abuses and moral excesses of the digital world, and its destructive and obsessive content that markets invitations to an ‘Electronic Jesus,’ hosting aspiring individuals with no horizons in front of the camera, generalizing the deception about an unfair trade-off: "Your mobile phone or your reputation?” Coppola's narrative is very ambitious, at times overwhelming with its sarcasm and prejudices. It needs patience to watch, bearing with the stimulating information about the names of famous people that fleetingly shine on the screen before they disappear, as well as the ‘hashtags’ and ‘amigos’ and their visual vocabulary.

Ziad Al Khozai