A real letdown

Rating: Null/10 (10 June 2010)

Marie Antoinette (Sofia Coppola, 2006) looks great, and has some interesting directorial touches, like Coppola's hand-held camera following queen Kirsten Dunst backwards down a corridor, into her quarters and up against a door, where she stands, sobbing. Sadly the central conceit, presenting Antoinette as a simple, fun-loving teenager with no real concept of her duties to state or humanity, doesn't really work and the script is extremely weak, engendering no empathy for its empty characters. With nothing invested in the protagonists and no clear dramatic tension in a story that should be loaded with it, Coppola's film is ultimately completely disengaging, with just a handful of bright spots amidst the deadening, sparkly tedium.