Boring.

Rating: 4/10 (13 October 2006)

After the Sofia Coppola's excellent "Lost in Translation", her latest movie, "Marie Antoinette" is a major disappointment. Aside from the wonderful Versailles background and the lavish costumes, there is absolutely nothing interesting about this movie. The dialog is insipid, the shots repetitive and overly long, and the acting - particularly that of Kirsten Dunst and Molly Shannon - was so uninspired as to be considered bad. Nothing in the movie seemed authentically French, as the court of Versailles seemed simply to be composed of a group of gossipy Americans with bad table manners and too much idle time. There was so little historical context that the gravity of the situation (Marie Antoinette not producing an heir) was not apparent and the lack of conjugal relations between Louis and his wife, instead, seemed laughable. In short, the French would not act this way, eat this way, talk this way and it is easy to see why this movie was so poorly received in France and at the Cannes film festival.