I'll say just this to the critics who damn this movie with faint praise: "Let 'em eat brioche!"
Marie Antoinette is a melancholic, marvelous, strange, beautiful film. Seen through the prism of Sofia Coppola's vision, Marie Antoinette was a trapped bird, tethered inside her gilded cage in a gilded age. An eternal innocent who became a woman, old before her time and aged prematurely by extreme circumstances beyond her reach or recognition.
Is it, as many have suggested, an overly sympathetic portrait, or too shallow an portrayal of the teen dauphine who found herself prematurely Queen? I don't think so. There is absolutely an arc of character development in the movie, in spite of the sometimes facile performance by the porcelain-faced Kirsten Dunst. The movie is gob smackingly gorgeous, but the prettiness is purposefully empty, a humming, rustling counterpoint -- along with the swelling art-punk 1980's soundtrack -- to the emptiness which presses in from without, and within.
Marie Antoinette is, more than anything else, a fabulist psychohistory of these few years in the life of Marie Antoinette, a young woman who found her life turned utterly upside down. Stripped of everything, literally to her undergarments, her identity is given up as a sacrifice to the forging of a Franco-Austrian alliance. No looking back. And no choice in the matter, whatsoever. Ever again.
The rules of propriety for a young royal may have relaxed in the intervening centuries, but as the late 20th century dissolutions of Diana's and Sarah's marriages to the Windsor men suggest, courtly life is rarely hospitable to women who "marry in". How much more, then, could Marie Antoinette's icy plunge into the gossipy, swollen court at Versailles have bridled her, put the bit in her mouth and harnessed her with its unfamiliar and even xenophobic constraints? "She looks like a child" they whisper among themselvs, upon her arrival, and indeed she does. The planes of her face reflect the light of heaven itself, her eyes still numinous with the penumbra of unaffected youth. Little wonder that she spends much of her time lolling about with young children, and always with dogs. Her own pet Pug was taken from her when she crossed the border from Austria into France, never to be returned again. "You can have French dogs" she is told, and the barbs begin.
Coppola hasn't made a perfect film, no. But she's made a film that looks deeply and well into what the mind and heart of a young girl's journey may have been under these extraordinary circumstances. Yes, at times it's rapturously pretty. Who knew she had such felicity with light and the pastoral scene, as when Marie is with her daughter in her "little village", or awash a field of golden stalks? Fittingly, these are the happiest times in the young Queen's life. They are the lustrous days, fleeting and fine, experienced as if in a dream as they are unfolding, minute by minute. She is fully herself, wholly present in those moments, and this is where the film hits its truly captivating stride, pounding at the solar plexus to be let in. Not with finery, and the hollow, superficial trappings of a "costume drama", but instead with the authenticity of a human story, a motif about who we are, well and artfully told.
Bravo!
This is where Marie Antoinette comes at last to life, and why it is a movie worth seeing. I only wish Coppola hadn't danced around so long before arriving here, at the real heart of the central character. Perhaps that is where she lost so many critics?
I am encouraged by Marie Antoinette in my belief that Sofia Coppola is making very good films, with not just something beautiful to show us, but something important to say. Like any other artist, she may not say it in her interviews, where she is often oblique, opaque, even guarded, but these films -- they are where to go if you want the answers to those reams of questions that interviewers ask. The technical ones, they can be answered, but the ones that demand answers which can only be delivered in celluloid form, well ... buy the ticket, go to the movie, don't skip out to the snack bar in the last third.
You don't want to miss the best part ...
L.A.E.
