Marie Antoinette
Review by Fritz Esker
When Marie Antoinette premiered at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year, stories abounded of the film drawing boos from the attending audience. The buzz was that writer/director Sofia Coppola (2003's brilliant Lost in Translation) made a disastrous decision in incorporating anachronistic music and modern touches to the story of the doomed French queen. In reality, the anachronistic touches are far less intrusive than one might imagine or fear. That being said, Marie Antoinette is still a major disappointment coming from such a talented filmmaker.
Marie (Kirsten Dunst) was a teenaged Austrian princess married off to French king-to-be Louis XVI (Jason Schwartzman). To put it mildly, Louis is an odd duck, appearing completely uninterested in either conversing with his new bride or consummating their marriage. While she at first finds the trappings of the French royal court ridiculous, Marie soon becomes enmeshed in it and turns into a free-spending party girl.
The film's biggest problem is its near-complete lack of narrative drive. Not much happens in the film, other than lavish partying and mean-spirited gossip. Coppola does a pretty good job of portraying how ludicrous the royal lifestyle is, particularly in the film's best scene where Marie learns that other members of the family have (and use) the privilege of coming into her bedroom in the morning to watch her dress. It doesn't stop there; a rigid hierarchy is enforced in that the highest ranking member of royalty is given the privilege of handing Marie the necessary items to get dressed (she is strictly forbidden for reaching for her own clothes as the other nobles have this privilege and they fiercely guard it).
What the film lacks the most and could have potentially saved it is context. French Revolution-era France is one of the most fascinating periods of history. The royal family lived in free-spending opulence while so many French citizens starved. As Dickens said in A Tale of Two Cities, "It was the best of times; it was the worst of times." Here, we only see the first half of that equation. If we had the full context of the situation, as opposed to a few throwaway lines here and there about the starving people, it might have made for a really effective film. The primary focus could have still been on Marie Antoinette, but for an audience to get a sense of her, I think they needed the historical context. Show us the contrast between desperate people dying in the streets and the oblivious indulgence of the royal court. The film sometimes does a decent job of showing how hard it is to have a clue as to what's going on in the world around you when you are as completely sheltered and pampered as the royal family was. This was probably one of the points Coppola was trying to make, but it would have been much more effective if we saw the other side of the coin.
The costume, set design, and cinematography are all gorgeous. Sadly, they are at the service of an unfocused narrative. As a result, Marie Antoinette ends up resembling the French court it portrays: beautiful to look at, but hollow on the inside.