Movie Review: "Marie Antoinette"

3.5 Stars



The Queen wears Cons and rocks out to New Order and the Banshees in Sofia Coppola’s lavish, though perhaps excessively opulent, re-envisioning of one of history’s most infamous monarchs.

Inspired by Antonia Fraser’s somewhat controversial biography, Coppola’s “Marie Antoinette” offers a sympathetic portrait of a young girl trapped in a glittering and cold palatial prison.

The film follows the Austrian-born princess from her engagement at 14 through her life at the royal court of Versailles. The majority of the film centers on Marie’s early inability to fully integrate into court life and reconcile her headstrong willfulness with a world so entirely governed by impenetrable rules of social decorum.

Alienated and alone, plagued by rumors and insinuations (most damagingly, the perpetual gossip surrounding her husband’s odd indifference to actually consummating their royal alliance), she suffers the sort of humiliations and personal tragedies that can only exist in the contrived world of an assembled and isolated ruling elite. Marie’s universe is precisely the sort of place where well dressed courtiers drift languidly through Versailles’ well manicured gardens and say silly things like “Oh how I do love the country” without a modicum of ironic inflection.

In its depiction of Marie’s private life, the film is gentle and forgiving. Through Coppola’s lens, Marie’s excess and indulgence achieve a sort of wistful purity and tragic transcendence, as if sadly embodying a spoiled, yet lonely child’s melancholic yearning.

The movie is, above all, a testament to incongruity and ambivalence: much as Marie is at once dangerously unrestrained and wholly stifled, Coppola herself is simultaneously attentive to historic detail and not unpleasantly anachronistic in her revisionism. Seamlessly integrating 80s post-punk in the most sublime of ways, there’s something undeniably lovely in her resuscitation of a dusty historical narrative, resisting stuffy reconstruction in favor of dreamily imaginative detail.

Though ostensibly starring Jason Schwartzman in a delightfully dead-pan turn as the blundering Louis XVI, and the luminous, ethereal, and well cast Kirsten Dunst (reuniting with the director after their collaboration on “The Virgin Suicides”), special mention must be given to the film’s unbilled supporting standouts: Versailles itself and a $40 million production budget chiefly represented by mountains of pastries, millions of powdered wigs, miles of elaborately embroidered silk, and of course enough painted, prancing ponies to mobilize a small republic’s national guard. That, and shoes. Many, many glorious shoes (which a discerning eye and a taste for Spanish decadence will surely recognize as the immortal Manolo Blahnik’s own handiwork).

All this is to say that the film, as an aesthetic object created for pop-culture consumption, is nothing short of gorgeous. But at the same time, it feels about as fleeting as the 80s glam-rock symphony that pervades it—delightful in its transience, but somehow ultimately hollow.

It’s not that the cast can really be blamed for this lack of emotional identifiability; quite on the contrary, Schwartzman and Dunst play incredibly well off each other as a quirky, awkward young couple, and Dunst is, as always, at her best when quietly channeling a vaguely whimsical detachment (it’s a delight to see her once again deliver on that early spark of promise that so distinguished “Interview with the Vampire”).

Idling somewhere between deep, existential dissatisfaction and a more than passing affinity for spectacle and self-indulgence, Coppola’s Marie drifts as aimlessly through the film as she does through her hermetically sealed world of gossip and isolation.

Early in the film, after a farcical morning “dressing ceremony” involving no less that 14 courtiers, an incensed Marie proclaims, “This is ridiculous!” to which her stern housemistress replies, “This, Madame, is Versaille.” And in the end, the film really is a whole lot like the elaborate world it reproduces and the sad, lost girl doomed to inhabit it: distractingly ornate and beautifully stylized, but somehow ultimately empty.

Bottom line: This sugar-rush of a celluloid confection temporarily dazzles, but ultimately leaves you unsatisfied. But still, at least the shoes are pretty sweet.