Delly

Marie Antoinette is probably the first film about this subject to START with the Revolution, as we see a voyeuristic shot of Kirsten Dunst bathing to Gang of Four's "Natural is Not In It," a song with some very pointed lyrics: "The problem of leisure / What to do for pleasure / I do love a new purchase / A market of the senses." It's as if we are in the mind of a peasant who, his fantasies inflamed by the gutter press, the rumors of wantonness and high living at Versailles, looks at his own life and, boiling over with sexual and economic jealousy, picks up an electric guitar and invents punk just to show his hatred for the rich bi--h who ruined his life. How did Coppola resist using "God Save The Queen?"

That burst of staged anger having passed, the rest of Marie Antoinette devotes itself to showing how the lower classes' hostility was or was not warranted. In a film full of Kubrick references, Marie herself is perhaps most like the corpulent recruit with the aristocratic name of "Leonard Lawrence" in Full Metal Jacket, chewing a jelly donut mechanistically while his fellow soldiers do push-ups. "They're paying for it it -- YOU eat it!" screams the drill sergeant. Marie Antoinette is a two-hour slo-mo of that jelly donut scene. She "enjoys" herself because that's what a queen is expected to do; and then she pays with her life for fulfilling those expectations, just for playing her part. The point: Enjoyment, la jouissance, doesn't exist.

Marie Antoinette seems like a poor little rich girl story. But that wouldn't explain the most touching scene in the film, when Rip Torn's Louis XV calls for his mistress on his deathbed, and we see his face crumple into pure grief when reminded that he'd already sent her away. Coppola's sign of maturity is that she extends her sympathy to everyone else in the story -- everyone except the peasants, that is, whose appearance in the final minutes is demonic enough to make you wonder how anyone could have ever thought a murderous mob was a triumphant expression of human liberty. Besides, Coppola tacitly suggests, if they had imagination, they could have wormed their way inside Versailles too ( Coppola's court is stocked with pop-culture royalty, after all, people who, like Asia Argento, may have been born into famous families but still had to prove their mettle. )

Jason Schwartzman as King Louis XVI and Marie have a strange relationship. They never fall in love, but there is something exhilarating about the way, in each others' presence, they can let the masks drop and be the kids they are. Schwartzman subtly gains confidence and there are some moments towards the end, calling on Marie at Le Petit Trianon, where you get a brief glimpse of something special, something truly royal, waiting to emerge. Heartbreakingly, it never does; the mob arrives. But when at the end they go to prison, you flash back to the cardinals and priests at their wedding and think, maybe there is something to all this "ridiculous" ceremony; maybe it was a heavenly and not an earthly marriage that was being arranged. And then you flash to the other scene where Marie and her friends are playing a guessing game with papers attached to their heads, each paper bearing a name -- one of the ladies-in-waiting has the name "Jesus Christ" on her head and asks, "Am I at this table?" and someone replies, "You're always with us." And then you realize just how many dimensions this film is working on.

If this review seems scattershot and impressionistic, well, so is the film. I could probably write a little experimental essay for each individual scene. I'll spare you that, but Sophia ( and Roman, her brother, who I feel had a large hand in this production ) has proved that she has a soul after all. With soul, you can raise other souls from the dead, restore them to their original truth, to their innermost dreams and longings... And that's exactly what she's done here. Despite my utter hatred for Sophia's two previous films, I'll admit I think this is the best period piece ever, and that includes Barry Lyndon. Marie Antoinette is literally to die for, a glorious, melancholy poem about unborn angels on the edge of an endless dawn.

If you're looking for the antidote to Since You Went Away-style hankiefests, or musicals about squeaky-clean GIs and their even squeakier cleaner girls, Those Endearing Young Charms fits the bill. Imagine a World War II romance with a lunchtime on-set rewrite by Louis-Ferdinand Celine ( "Women love war; it goes straight to their ovaries" ) and you might come up with something like this film, which lays on the syrupy romance and the goggle eyes while secretly brimming with misanthropy that would make Kubrick proud.

Lower middle-class Laraine Day is seduced by the wealthy officer played by Robert Young, while being chased by idealistic cadet Bill Williams. Young makes no bones about being a skirt-chaser with a heart of purest copper. The spectacle of the film is in Day's self-mutilating puppy dog devotion to a lost cause, and what it says about female masochism and love itself in a world of organized murder. The director plays it totally straight so that the sentimental target audience would be satisfied, while transmitting his message in code, as it were, to future generations who can read between the lines.

The film has many touches to make the concept plausible, such as when Day is taken to Young's base and immediately begins cooing over a phallic B-12. Soon afterwards, the waitress comes over to the table and the jests of the soldiers suggest that she has been a lazy Susan that all of them fed off of at least once, and then -- judging by her bitter hardness -- discarded. The idea of these being "good soldiers fighting a just war" doesn't seem very plausible in this instance. It seems all wars bring with them certain personal motivations.

The script locates the epicenter of innocence and true romance not in the woman but in Bill Williams, a kind of fetal Parsifal. He reminds you of the guy in The Canterbury Tales whose dream girl, who he unknowingly catches in bed with another man, tells him to close his eyes before sticking her butt out the window for him to kiss, followed by the raucous laughter of her and her real boyfriend -- Chaucer then says succinctly of the young man "For woman's love he cared no more." Williams goes through a similarly elaborate process of inoculation with Laraine Day. He proceeds through all the stages of devotion and its aftermath: puppy love, courtly wooing, brotherly support, then noble renunciation, none of which she notices.

But at the end, after giving up what he never had, he says, looking visibly exalted "Why do I feel so good?" That's the question that stays with you from this film.

P.S. The title seems to be sarcastic not only about the allure of youth but about its lead actor!