Marie Antoinette

I had high hopes for this one since I love reading biographies. Granted that not everything is accurate nor can be fit into a movie we can only make do with what is presented in this case an overlong rock and roll video that has pretty sets and costumes. Marie Antionette came off a little slow and boring though life in the French Court and it's protocols were very amusing to quote MA in the dressing scene "This is ridiculous." Sofia Coppola could've have focused a little more on MA's loneliness in a lousy marriage and the court intrigues and a little less on the extravagant shopping sprees. What is surprising is the infamous Necklace Affair wasn't even included since most modern historians agree MA was innocent from that scandal. Acting wise Kirsten Dunst pulled off a difficult job of playing a childlike queen upfront but a woman who suffered humiliation behind the scenes however it is Rose Byrne who stole the show (along with the sets, costumes and the yummy cakes) as the Duchesse de Polignac a role she plays with believable aplomb. Asia Argento looked a little old for Madame Du Barry and Mary Nighy is nice as the Princesse Lamballe, another unfortunate victim of the Revolution. Jason Shwartzman plays a rather stiff Louis XVI while Jamie Dorman is hot as Count Axel Fersen. Everyone else like Judy Davis, Shirley Henderson and Molly Shannon had nothing to do but gossip and look silly. Marianne Faithful floored me with her regal Maria Therese. In the end the movie was a little shallow and the rock and roll soundtrack seemed out of place. It was like watching a 80's music video.

In 1768, Marie Antoinette (Kirsten Dunst) is a young princess in Austria. Her mother sets her to marry the future French king Louis XVI (Jason Schwartzman). She is naive and inexperienced in the ways of the Versailles court. There is King Louis XV of France (Rip Torn), his mistress Madame du Barry (Asia Argento), and Comtesse de Noailles (Judy Davis). The Dauphin is distant and Marie struggles to connect with him. They are not sexual and she's under pressure to give an heir to the throne.

Sofia Coppola delivers a bright, light Marie Antoinette. She's very modern. There is some nice tension as the pressure builds for a baby. The movie fades away after that as France falls into revolution. Dunst is better as the young teen more than the older queen. The movie has the costumes but the drama isn't always there.

I have seen this film yesterday after a lot of hype up and waiting since in my little town everything comes out a month after the release date. I was looking forward to seeing this movie..a lot. But I must say that the trailers I had seen and the film have a completely different feeling. This isn't a bad film but I think that it well get a lot of criticism for not being historically accurate, not serious enough, being too long, being 'unfinished'... but those are not he bad points of this movie. The style is original and Sofia Coppola succeeds at showing Marie Antoinette's personal side. Her suffering through gossip and humiliation by her husbands lack of 'interest' in her etc. She succeeds in showing Marie Antoinette as a naive girl in the beginning..who hugs her first lady, cries at parting with her dog and announcing that the morning ceremonials are ridiculous. We see Marie Antoinette at the beginning trying to fit in with the strict life at Versailles but further on it's clear that with the gossip following her she stops caring and starts to have fun her own way which leads to her ruin. The negative points of the film is that Sofia Coppola uses the same techniques, the same scenes through out the movie. The trying on of shoes, the hairdressing, the patisserie dishes and the champagne. We see Marie Antoinette frolicking around in the grass too many times. Sofia Coppola apparently tried to show a girl out of touch with reality who lives just to have fun..to escape the wagging tongues of Versailles. But if that was her point the film should've ended long before. This is a biography of Marie Antoinette...even though not a completely serious or historically accurate one...but if Sofia Coppola is trying to show this French queens personality and human side then I can assure you there was more to her than the frilly lace, the satin shoe, the bakery department and the champagne. Marie-Antoinette was a mother who cared about her children and was involved with them..though we hardly we see this in the film except the sequence of her and her daughter on the farm. The relationship and the feelings she had for her husband aren't very clear and his for her aren't very much elucidated. This is a visually beautiful film but I think Sofia Coppola could've delved deeper into this rich personality. In the end you're left with the impression of stepping out from a hazy rose petal fragile dream that from someones tumultuous life. But a dream that's still worth seeing.

Sophia Coppola really seems to know how to ruin a potentially great movie concept. Marie Antoinette is a fascinating figure in European history and one would expect the movie to account for at least a few interesting things that happened when she came to France to live with the prince. What we see is another sugarcoated Hollywood movie which is pretty much exactly like those teen highschool movies where rich young girls gossip, obsess with fashion and popularity etc. The only difference here are the costumes and the fact that not all the women in this movie are as young.

To top it off, the soundtrack...well, let me first put it this way, as a stand alone compilation, it's terrific to listen to but the way the modern tunes and songs have been incorporated in the sequences looks ill fit. It looks like a the characters have gone to a current day costume party rather than a movie of the period. Moreover, Coppola fails to draw the body language and nuances of the French culture from her actors. Not once does one get the impression that this is a story about France. As a result of bad direction and terrible writing, the performances of the actors suffer even though Kirsten Dunst does the best she could with the given material.

The director portrays Antoinette as naive and frivolous. There is no mention of her historical accomplishments or failures. Now it isn't an easy task to convincingly tell the story of a historical figure in two hours but Coppola focuses the entire two hours on Antoinette being fascinated by her riches and partying around. A competent director and writer could have done so much more with the storytelling. In the current case, only near the very end things start to move along but here too the story speeds up at such a superfast pace that the ending is extremely abrupt and contrived.

'Marie Antoinette' is like a bad birthday present that is wrapped beautifully but once unwrapped, the gift itself is far from satisfactory.

Based on the recent Marie-Antoinette biography by Antonia Fraser, Sofia Coppola's film focuses on the personal qualities of the character of Marie-Antoinette and thus participates in the character's historical rehabilitation. Antoinette is seen as a respectful loyal daughter, a loving mother, a patient wife, who had to withstand a flood of vindictive criticism since the moment she set foot in the French court. This depiction contrasts strongly with many prior representations of the character in film ("The Affair of the Necklace" for example), which show her as superficial, selfish and vain.

The visuals and auditory elements, which evoke a powerful image of 18th-century Versailles, are the movie's forte. And their effects linger in one's mind (or at least they did in mine) long after one's exit from the theater. As a budding art historian, I was stunned by the intensely lush visual spectacle the film has to offer: the pomp and circumstance of ritualized and regimented 18th-century Versailles. The semi-private world that Antoinette builds for herself to escape Versailles's codified, quasi-totalitarian atmosphere, is evoked through a sequence of fast-moving images of champagne-guzzling, beautifully-decorated cake-eating, and Manolo Blahnik shoe buying. Thus Antoinette's fantasy world is likened to a world recognizable to you, me and Carrie Bradshaw. Some people may scoff at this 21st century world transposed to an earlier time. But as the center of the world in 18th-century Europe, Marie-Antoinette's "secret Versailles" would certainly have been as "hip" as this, and Coppola has found effective means through sound and image by which to make this hipness accessible.

The story zooms in on the character of Marie-Antoinette, played by a ravishing Kirsten Dunst, who arrives at Versailles at the tender age of 14, to become queen of France a mere 5 years later. Coppola emphasizes the loneliness of Antoinette throughout the film: most important is her alienation from the French court by the fact that she is a foreigner (something that made her a scapegoat for all of France's problems during the 1780's). Her powerlessness to "fit in" is emphasized also through her sexual alienation from her socially-awkward husband (played by Jason Schwartzmann), her mother's chidings that she has not yet produced an heir to the French throne (and thereby has not secured Austria's political place in Europe), and the bitchy gossip that goes on behind her back at court.

Marie-Antoinette is depicted as an intensely personable, friendly and playful person. Coppola fashions a Marie-Antoinette who is a dutiful daughter, a patient wife to Louis (who eventually overcomes his shyness and becomes a loving and protective husband and father), and a caring and tender mother. She is shown as both bold and humble, two qualities which had quasi-miraculous effects on both the court and the angry mob, as is shown in some of the film's most touching moments.

Equipped with these "essential" personal qualities, the charges traditionally made against Marie-Antoinette fade completely. It is precisely Antoinette's ill-fated attempt at fitting into French court society that causes her escape into a world of idle futility and libertinage. Her escape into the world of "playing shepherdess" in her pleasure-house of Le Hameau is shown not as a silly escape from responsibility but as the simple human need to be surrounded by the natural world. This place appears to us as it does to Antoinette: as a refuge from the backbiting, totalitarian regime of Versailles. Even the legendary "let them eat cake" statement allegedly made by Marie-Antoinette is discarded as fiction.

There is almost no place in the film for the 18th-century reality as it existed outside the bubble-like world of Versailles. This is not the movie's purpose. The end of the film is a bit abrupt: the last image shows the royal family heading to Paris to be imprisoned in the building of the Conciergerie. There is no mention of the guillotine anywhere, which again can seem surprising, but which shows that Coppola deliberately tried to eschew stereotypes and do something different. And it is all to her credit.