Marie Antoinette

The modern collides with the historical in Marie Antoinette, Sofia Coppola's feminist pop attempt at historiography, focusing on one of Europe's most infamous monarchs. Most of the buzz around the film centered on its gleeful sonic anachronism, the peculiarity of placing Adam Ant and New Order songs on the soundtrack of a film set in 18th Century France overwhelming all the writer/director's other daring tweaks to the conventional period biopic formula.

In borrowing a gimmick from A Knight's Tale, Coppola forces her audience to view Antoinette from a contemporary perspective. There is no historical context provided for her story, save the most spare, faintly-sketched indications of trouble brewing down Bastille way. Antoinette (Kirsten Dunst), a 14 year old Austrian princess, marries the 15 year old French dauphin Louis (Jason Schwartzman) to cement the alliance between the two countries. She moves to Versailles, leaving behind her family, friends and all her worldly possessions, and must immediately begin the process of birthing a viable male heir to the throne of France.

That's about all that Antoinette knows going in to her adventure, and so it's about all the information Coppola gives us. She provides quick signposts along the way - the French army becomes overextended fighting in the American revolution, Antoinette has trouble conceiving with Louis, who appears sexually disinterested in her, bread shortages and mounting poverty cause riots in nearby Paris - but the conflict in Marie Antoinette all occurs within the palace at Versailles, and more closely resembles a coming-of-age drama than a sweeping historical epic.

As in Shekhar Kapur's acclaimed 1998 Elizabeth, Coppola investigates a specific moment in the life of a young female monarch. Both Britain's Elizabeth I and France's Marie Antoinette were expected to sacrifice their personal aspirations and private lives for the good of their nation. The former approaches the topic optimistically, as if the surrendering of the Self to the Communal is an achievable and commendable goal, while the latter sees it as ludicrous and farcical to expect of a teenaged girl.

Antoinette's arrival in France, then, is a series of dehumanizing and depersonalizing rituals, designed to break her individual spirit and enforce upon her the responsibilities of her new position.

When crossing the border from her native Austria into France, she must strip naked and leave behind all the possessions of a foreign court (even her beloved dog). Having arrived at Versailles, she's instructed by the Comtesse de Noailles (Judy Davis in the film's best performance) on all the limitations on her life in court; she must not ever reach out for anything, she must pay proper respect to the correct nobles while slighting others, she must obey myriad inconvenient and counter-intuitive regulations and she must sacrifice every last moment of privacy. Once entering into marriage with the future king, in other words, Antoinette ceases to be a person and becomes a personification of the power and nobility of the French state.

It's here that the similarities between Elizabeth and Marie Antoinette end. In fact, Coppola's film could be described as the anti-Elizabeth. Like most historical dramas, Elizabeth focuses intently on socio-political intrigue and context. Though altered and punched-up for the sake of entertainment, the conflict nonetheless arises from the actual business of Elizabeth I's early reign, particularly the various coups and attempts on her life and crown. Unfortunately, most historical events are too nebulous and complex to accurately depict in an entertaining narrative film, so movies trying to summarize them are often more about the illusion of historical accuracy than anything else. Glory and Lawrence of Arabia are based on real history, but they are entertainments above all else, pieces of fiction primarily concerned with pleasing audiences.

Coppola's film evades this issue entirely by using history as a setting and not a subject. She intentionally leaves out most of the pertinent information about France in the 1770's. Perhaps this is out of fidelity to the lead character's perpsective. It's never made clear whether Antoinette simply doesn't care about what goes on beyond the palace walls or if she's specifically disallowed to find out, but the life she had before coming to Versailles and the life beyond its carefully-manicured grounds don't intrude at all into her world until it's too late. But I think Coppola made the choice because of her preference for visual storytelling and montage, rather than a lot of weighty, expositional dialogue. A simple scene of Antoinette and her young daughter gathering eggs at their small country farm advances the story she wants to tell better than 3 lengthy conversations about the French government's waning finances.

Marie Antoinette is just what the name implies - a story about a girl. In particular, one who buckles under the weight of the world's expectations, who ultimately fails in a near-impossible task but nonetheless manages to have some fun along the way. It's a relatively small, quirky film, slyly funny and idiosyncratic, but one that strikes me as more daring and true to itself than most other 2006 offerings.



Coppola's approach to history mirrors the narrative non-fiction bestsellers of David McCullough. This is French history as a young adult novel, focused on vivid personalities and courtly gossip rather than international diplomacy and macroeconomics. It's a bildungsroman based on the life of a real French woman rather than some hypothetical writerly creation. Antoinette begins the film as a child, giggling with her friends as they gaze a locket bearing the image of her betrothed, and ends the film as not just a woman, but a queen. Her journey will mirror the struggle of other young people, particularly young girls, as their own desires push back against the expectations of an unjust patriarchal society that tries to corral them and place ceilings on their ambitions.

Like Elizabeth, Antoinette lusts for a man she can't be with, in this case a hunky Swedish soldier, Count Fersen (Jamie Dornan). Coppola occasionally plays these sexual frustrations for laughs, as in a scene when Antoinette gazes out the window and fantasizes about her man in the heat of bloody combat, but also makes the stakes of extramarital flirtation clear. The strength of her marriage directly corresponds to the strength of Austria's ties to France. Should she fail to produce a male heir, or fails to otherwise please her husband or his grandfather the King (Rip Torn), she threatens the security of not only her mother (Marianne Faithful) and extended family but her God and country. A terrific sequence in which her brother (Danny Huston) comes to Versailles to do a little marriage counseling drives this point home. He's willing to do whatever it takes, even providing the second-in-line to the throne of France with delicate sex advice, in order to secure the future of his lineage.

It's only one case out of many in which Antoinette's personality and privacy are subservient to her official duties as France's Dauphine. An ex-prostitute named Madame du Barry (Asia Argento), the laughingstock of Versailles, has become the mistress of King Louis XIV. Though it will harm her reputation with her friends and fellow royals, Antoinette has no choice but to make nice for diplomatic purposes. As part of her humiliating morning ritual, Antoinette must disrobe in front of a room full of servants and aristocrats, the highest-ranking of whom get the privilege of helping her to dress for the day. Every time she wants a glass of water, she must ask for it specifically and wait for someone to bring the glass on a silver tray. She even has to give birth to her daughter in front of an audience of eager spectators.

Lacking any kind of real purpose or self-determination, Antoinette explores the ways in which she is permitted, as a royal, to express herself. This includes gambling and drinking excessively, holding lavish parties and buying fancy shoes.

(The film implies that, in addition to the bread shortages and foreign wars, Antoinette's spending habits helped to cripple the French economy and spark the French Revolution. This sounds dubious to me, but I don't exactly fancy myself an expert on the period, so I'll shut up. I guess it's enough that the people felt that her spending exacerbated the problem.)

Modern parallels can clearly be drawn. Some have suggested online already that the film may mirror Coppola's own biography. Born into a famous, wealthy family and thrust into the public eye at a young age, Sofia Coppola found out the hard way the privileges and costs of early noteriety. It's hard to imagine the effect of her Godfather III infamy on such a young mind, but there's certainly a shadow of that situation in Antoinette's sudden disfavor among the French citizens. (They see her extravagant lifestyle as indicative of all that's wrong with the aristocracy, just as audiences viewed Coppola's casting as indicative of her father's egotism and failure to cap his trilogy in satisfying fashion.)

Though compelling in its own way, this kind of auteur interpretation can only take you so far. Perhaps some of the details of Marie Antoinette apply to Sofia Coppola's life because they are widely applicable for young people, especially young women. Though more direct and forceful than is typical, there's nothing unique about the expectations placed on Antoinette by the landed European aristocracy.

Young women still get married under the expectation to look good, keep up appearances and procreate. They are still seen as status symbols and a form of currency, particularly here in Los Angeles. (Is Coppola's Antoinette the original "trophy wife"?)

Certainly, she did not invent the grandiose luxury of Versailles single-handedly, and though she eventually gets caught up in and consumed by the excess, Coppola sees this as a slowly-developing crutch rather than a personal tendency. Like David Bowie's alien at the end of The Man Who Fell to Earth, Antoinette has vast wealth and privilege, but seemingly no control over her own destiny. Their successes leave them feeling empty, so they each sink into a morass of alcoholism, despair and self-pity.

It's interesting that Antoinette becomes a touchpoint for the anger of the French mob as they storm Versailles and arrest the royal family. She insists that the famed quote "Let them eat cake" is a fabrication, yet her spiraling debts and party-girl lifestyle come to represent all that is loathed about the ruling elite. (A montage shows a portrait of Antoinette with various angry rants scrawled on top, in English, to demonstrate the anger of Parisians against their spend-crazy queen.) This, too, has its applications to the modern day, with heiresses like Paris Hilton and even the Bush twins standing in for the average America's rage at greedy fatcats, and Kanye West delighting millions with put-downs about skanky "gold-diggers."

Coppola opens the film with a provocative shot, showing Antoinette in a bathtub licking icing from an elegant, tiered cake off of her finger. There's something of a punk rock aesthetic to the shot, from the music on the soundtrack to Dunst's cockeyed gray bouffant wig to her Courtney Love-esque lethargic demeanor. It's almost as if Coppola presents us with the traditional view of Marie Antoinette up front - spoiled boozy rich girl - before slowly peeling back the layers and showcasing the ruined victim underneath.

I enjoyed the film, though from a purely technical level, I think it's probably Coppola's weakest to date. Lance Acord, who also shot Lost in Translation for Coppola and Being John Malkovich for her ex-husband Spike Jonze, renders Versailles and its environs prettily but unremarkably. The most memorable visual sequence, from which that above still was taken, is a Parisian masquerade ball to which Louis and his wife sneak away one night. The hazy sepia tones give the sequence an almost storybook quality, appropriately nostalgic considering that it's the first meeting between Antoinette and her sometime-lover, Count Fersen.

Though most of the song choices work well (particularly Bow Wow Wow's "Candy" set against a montage of Antoinette buying shoes and eating puff pastries and a pair of moody songs by The Radio Dept.), some are just as glaring and intrusive as you'd expect. Particularly the Strokes song "What Ever Happened?," which comes out of nowhere, totally violates the atmosphere of its given scene and seems artificially plunked into the movie so that audience members born after the mid-'80s would recognize at least one song on the soundtrack.