For anyone who's ever been caught in a relationship where "not enough sex" was an issue, try having the pressure of a king, your own mother and an entire empire weighing on your ability to conceive. Add to that a whole court of grimly made-up duchesses and ladies-in-waiting looming from behind what I always thought was the Versailles equivalent of a modern-day museum's do-not-touch velvet rope encircling the royal bed. And damn it, your husband never seems to be in the mood, and you can't decide between buttons or no buttons on your cuffs, and some stuffy advisor keeps bothering you about Poland or some place. "God help us, we're too young to reign," says Jason Schwartzman's Louis XIV upon his coronation.
With such appropriate superficiality begins Sofia Coppola's film version of Marie Antoinette's life, ostensibly based on the Lady Antonia Fraser's biography Marie Antoinette: The Journey, but really -- it's Marie Antoinette. We all know what happens. Austrian princess ascends to dauphine of France when she marries the rather ineffectual Louis XVI, indulges with abandon on the dwindling fortunes of a decaying empire and ultimately drives the peasants to revolt and infamously assassinate its royal leaders.
Except in this case, there is no beheading. Coppola knows well what she can't do. As the final film in her self-described "coming-of-age" trilogy, Marie Antoinette departs from her first two directorial ventures in that the heavy-lidded haze of uncertainty and comatose disgust are absent.
gust which pervaded her characters' lives in both The Virgin Suicides and Lost in Translation. The uncertainty is still there, though lost amid brighter colors, poorly executed montages of cakes and shoes, flowing champagne and fun(!), all of which were used instead to focus on the other side of adolescence -- young girls allowed to be carefree and happy.
Like the disgustingly wealthy characters of the royal court, the movie allows its audience to indulge in unabashed escapism, though they cannot experience a completely detached enjoyment. You have to cringe (a lot) when the pair upon pair of shoes are thrust upon Marie Antoinette (Kirsten Dunst), or when Louis XVI can do nothing but sit and dimly nod while his advisors inform him of, and then decide for him, France's political state. The costumes are indeed beautiful, notably the dark, monstrous silk contraptions worn by Madame du Barry, Louis XV's mistress played in typical dark horse fashion by Asia Argento. The scenes of the masquerade are stunningly inviting -- and just sinister enough to belie the opulence of its guests. Coppola's fascination with pre-dawn light has Dunst rolling around on the grass after lavish dinner parties, but one can't help to compare it with Dunst's miserable fate as Lux Lisbon over the same, left alone on a dewy high school football field in The Virgin Suicides.
The tired claim that Coppola relies on style over substance is accurate, but so is the statement "people breathe." Yeah, I'm put off too by the good number abusing this privilege, but it's more an observation than it is an insult. The film is highly stylized, is brightly colored, and reaches the top but never vaults completely over as either Coppola cannot fully escape the subdued cloudy staging of her earlier characters or she wants to deflate her own employment of grandiosity with a bit of humor and humility in the absence of a beheading. Beyond that, the characters all seemed anachronistically clean, rendering the film more a moving painting than presenting it as the filthy, hopelessly perfumed world it more closely resembled. However, these figures were nonetheless just as faithfully vapid and catty, again an example of Coppola's undercutting of her own stylizations. Though here, it may not have been enough.
The monumental decision to eliminate scenes of the beheading becomes understandable -- with the advertisements reading "Have you ever wanted to live like there's no tomorrow?" Coppola makes it clear that she is not interested in much beyond adolescence, the queen's or anyone else's. In her distinctive fashion, it is but alluded to with the final scene of a shattered chandelier among an expanse of destruction in the king and queen's Versailles bedroom.
But do we need to be inundated with more shameless diversion in an instance where consequence was so well warranted? Coppola is hardly responsible for a generation not only participating in but obsessed with grotesque phenomena like My Super Sweet 16, though it is this exact spirit which echoes 18th century France, albeit, certainly, with much less style. Marie Antoinette offers the ultimate viewer escapism, and it is only in this way -- taglines, neon disclaimers and all -- that the movie mildly succeeds.
