A nice tale but not a biography

Rating: 6/10 (3 September 2007)

As a Frenchman, I was really delighted to watch a movie about Marie-Antoinette, coming from outer-Atlantic. We cut her head off, but I notice that she is always fascinating people from the oldest republics in the world: USA and France. The movie is well colored, costumes are marvelous, using rock and roll music is also a good idea. The actors are not bad, especially Mary-Jane Watson in the main part, as Sofia Coppola elected to see Marie -Antoinette as a lost teenager, unadapted to a so much exposed and sumptuous court. What Coppola uses to say is that she was 14 when she came in France. OK, she is right. But to be 14 in the XVIIIth century was very different from now. The "teenagers" was not a concept in itself. At that time, people was either children or adult. And adulthood was earlier than now. Children from the mob used to work very early, and the others were educated to become rulers very soon. Marie-Antoinette was raised to be a princess or a queen, even if protocol at the Austrian court was loser than at the French one. Furthermore, she was not a teenager any more when she became queen, as she was 18. It was the age of maturity at that time. So, she had no excuse for being immature, what she was not any more. That is the only bad thing about this movie. It doesn't say a word about the greatest about: her treachery. She betrayed France by choosing to be Austrian before being queen of France and sent valuable information to her brother (Emperor of Austria) through the Austrian ambassador first, and then through her lover Axel Fersen. Another grief could be her bad advices to her husband who truly loved her (which was quite unusual) and trusted her in politics. One of the explanations of the failure of the monarchy could have been the court system and the Chinese wall between the rulers and the people, but not the age of the Queen. The movie ends at the most interesting period of French history: the beginning of the revolution.
However, this movie is amusing if you do not imagine that it was reality.