Nothing really ‘happens’ in Sofia Coppola’s take on the misunderstood French queen, so the right approach is to let yourself go and yield to the infectious fun.
By: Bob Brown
"Let them eat cake." You don’t say. And she didn’t. Poor Marie Antoinette miscast as a monarch in life and misquoted as an insensitive boor after death. She was harnessed into a marriage she never wanted and was vilified for the sins of a French aristocracy to which she didn’t belong.
Antonia Fraser’s fresh biography, Marie Antoinette: The Journey, inspired director Sofia Coppola to examine Marie in a new light. The result is Marie as Pop-Tart. As played by Kirsten Dunst, she’s starts as a frisky 14-year-old who is bewildered after her virtual kidnapping to Versailles. She was in a glass cage to produce an heir to the throne: "I put on my rouge and wash my hands in front of the whole world," she wrote to her mother in Austria. What’s a teen to do but surrender to the empty pleasures that abound?
Surrounded by her giddy girlfriends, Marie’s neck-deep in petits fours, bonbons, pouty lap dogs, silks and shoes, shoes, shoes, shoes, shoes. And oh, the masked balls, the parties, the jeroboams of champagne cascading into 34 crystal goblets, a giddy orgasmic fountain of bubbles. It makes the coifed head whirl.
But what choice did she have? The young king, Louis XVI (Jason Schwartzman), was a nincompoop. He didn’t know his elbow from the middle appendage that would give him an heir. He’s more aroused by metal locks than blond ones. The marriage wasn’t consummated for seven years. Here were two awkward teenagers, captives of an ultra-ritualistic French court.
To put viewers into the midst of Marie’s world, Coppola wanted to break away from the usual dry historical dramas that tend to create beautiful period pieces with cardboard characters. "I was taken by the idea that, because she was so unhappy in her marriage, she started shopping and going to parties as a distraction like a contemporary rich wife in a loveless marriage. She really didn’t want to go home to this guy who was always rejecting her, so she found other ways to distract herself," Coppola said in production notes to the film.
At the same time, the opportunity to revel in the opulence that was 18th century Versailles was irresistible. How to combine the rich visuals with a kicky contemporary feel? The real Palace of Versailles is the set and a great deal of attention was paid to historically accurate dress, etiquette and furnishings. But to re-create the giddiness of youthful abandon, Coppola turned to modern pop music, especially New Romantic pop of the 1980s, which celebrated extravagance and hedonism. The music supervisor was Brian Reitzell, who chose an eclectic mix of period music from France, pop of the ’80s and post-modern sounds.
The soundtrack is greatly responsible for establishing the character of Marie and of the film. At first, it’s jarring to watch over-dressed courtiers bopping to the strains of Bow Wow Wow and Adam Ant. But the right approach is to let yourself go and yield to the infectious fun of it all.
The look of the movie is also uniquely upbeat, considering the tendency of most Masterpiece Theatre-type productions to portray "history" through a sort of muted, smoky veil. Cinematographer Lance Acord, production designer K.K. Barrett and costume designer Milena Canonero collaborated to create a glittering, candy-coated playground that suited the sugary surface of an overfed and uninvolved aristocracy.
While it’s all very exciting to see and hear this film, the empty repetition of ritual and gustatory abandon (why doesn’t anyone get fat on all that pastry?) are soon as numbing to the viewer as they must have been to the participants. Nothing really "happens," which is the point.
Dunst is perfectly cast as the buoyant young Marie, even though she doesn’t quite age as much as she would have, given the time span the film covers. By the time the royal family is chased from the palace, the king and queen are older, but hardly wiser than they ever were.
Schwartzman seems an odd choice for King Louis XVI, who was a man of few words and less thought. He’s most humorous at mealtimes, munching rabbit-like on a single stalk of asparagus, surrounded by a retinue of formalistic attendants. Other outstanding performers are Judy Davis as Comtesse de Noailles, Steve Coogan as Ambassador Mercy and Rip Torn as the dirty old Louis XV.
On a personal note, I saw this film in a theater on the Champs Elysées, with a sparse matinee audience of dour Parisians, to judge by the reactions. The French take film and their history seriously. How impertinent of an American to tart it all up. Perhaps it’s better to watch with a hometown crowd where we understand what it means to muck about with tradition.
Rated PG-13 for sexual content, partial nudity and innuendo.

