Pretty Boring in Pink or Lost in Versailles

Rating: 3/10 (24 July 2007)

Sophia Coppola's "Marie Antoinette" (2006) is an embarrassing disaster - glamorous, colorful, shot inside and outside of French Versailles in its most lavish but disaster nevertheless. I don't know for whom the movie was made - perhaps, for Ms. Coppolla herself to add another chapter to her dreamy quiet slow moving films about bored and confused young girls. Her previous work, "Lost in Translation" was quite good even if not a timeless masterpiece as some critics and viewers tend to believe. Her latest film about a girl who happened to be born in 1755, a daughter and sister to the Austrian Emperors, the future wife and mother to French Kings, simply does not work. The film starts when Marie is 15 and she leaves her beloved Vienna to marry the future Luis XVI. She arrives to the most fashionable, glamorous, and corrupted European court where she would remain "the foreigner", "The Austrian". The film depicts Marie's life up until 1789 when the Great French Revolution starts with the storming of Bastille, the infamous Paris prison on July 14, 1789, and the King and Queen leave Versailles forever to meet their destiny. The film completely omits the final chapter of Marie Antoinette's life and never mentions the circumstances of her last five years. These five years were filled with the purest tragedy: death of her husband who was tried for treason, found guilty and executed on the guillotine, separation from her son who was taken from her and died in captivity when he was 12 years old. She herself was brought to trial where she was accused among the other things in sexual abuse of her son. To this horrible accusation, the former queen, "the Widow Capet" or simply "Antoinette Capet" replied with the genuine royal dignity, "If I have not replied it is because Nature itself refuses to respond to such a charge laid against a mother..."
When I visited Paris several years ago, I went to see The Conciergerie Prison where Marie Antoinette was kept before her death and from where she was taken on the morning of October 16, 1793, "forced into a tumbrel and paraded through the streets of Paris for over an hour before reaching the Place de la Révolution where the guillotine stood." Spending short time in the Antoinette's prison cell let me learn about her tragic final days that Sofia Coppola chose not to include in her movie. I respect her decision to tell the story of the ill-fated last Queen of France as a bored and frustrated teenage girl with a sweet smile and charming dimples, whose equally young, shy and totally inexperienced husband was more interested in the history of locks and keys than in making love and children to her but by making Marie-Antoinette the central figure of the film and never taking her camera outside the palace, Coppolla limited her movie to the typical "chick flick" that happened to take place in Versailles.
Marie-Antoinette as played by Kurstin Dunst is not very interesting person; she leads a boring life within the strict etiquette's rules of the Royal Palace, and all she wants - to have some fun. It is OK to make a movie about boring life of boring and bored insignificant people but it is not OK to never mention what actually was going on outside the palace where the real life was happening and the revolution was brewing way before Coppola chose to mention the shortage of bread for the commoners and storming of Bastille. The second half of the 18th Century was enormously interesting and eventful time in the history of France, Europe, and the World. It was the time when Mozart wrote his music, Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais had finished his three Figaro plays, and the most brilliant one, "The Marriage of Figaro" was banned by the King for its irreverent attitude towards the aristocracy from being performed. Outside the Palace's walls, very intelligent, free thinking angry young men from "Third Estate" (the "Commons"), grew up, received good education, and became lawyers, physicians, journalists, and scientists. Influenced by philosophical and political ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the principles of Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité that they embraced in The Jacobin Club in Paris, they later would become leaders of the French Revolution that would destroy the old regime of the absolute monarchy but eventually turn into the Reign of Terror in which the passionate revolutionaries would perish along with the aristocrats. Among them, Mirabeau - a great orator and able statesman; Danton, a figure larger than life; Robespierre, known as "incorruptible", Jean Paul Marat, scientist and revolutionary. None of them have been ever mentioned in the movie. Even the notorious Affair of the diamond necklace that was historically significant as one of the events that led to the French populace's bitter disappointment with the monarchy and contributed to the growing hatred toward the Queen who had been nicknamed, "Madam Deficit", did not deserve a single remark in the movie about Marie Antoinette. Ironically, Sophia Coppola chose to finish her movie once Marie Antoinette grew up and became more interesting and mature. She stopped to be a bored and boring spoiled little girl, and the director lost the interest in her.
I've read some articles that defend the film by saying that it is not a historic movie but "the story of the silly teenager who embodied a corrupt, absolutist state in its terminal decadence". These articles keep pointing to the visual beauty, production design, Oscar winning costumes, and nice cinematography. They are indeed lovely and the movie is an eye candy but Marie Antoinette as she was presented in the Sophia Coppola's movie can't herself hold this viewer's interest no matter how many pretty dresses with the elegant matching shoes she has changed and how many tiny delightful pastries she has eaten, and I am a huge fan of low cut dresses and those delicious pastries, believe me.