Boy, Did They Eat Cake.

Rating: 3/10 (10 April 2008)

The film has a fine cast and there are some original touches. The American actors speak unaccented English, without as much as a nod to any alien phones, for instance, despite the late 18th-century French setting. And there may be snatches of rococo music but most of the score is electronically amplified rock with, at one point, a singer belting out the old Frank Sinatra standard, "Fools Rush In." There are multiple close ups of lavish plates of exquisitely prepared and presented food. And minute examination of clothing, wigs, fabrics, jewelry, and period shoes -- especially shoes. (The hairdresser who dolls up Kirsten Dunst as Marie Antoinette is a fairy and is played for laughs.) Miniature dogs. Lots of miniature dogs slurping up charlotte russes or other desserts.
Okay -- decadence in abundance. It might have taken ten minutes. Instead, that's what the entire film seems to be about.
You have to applaud the director's intent to do something different, something original. The problem is that it doesn't work. Rip Torn's speech doesn't sound too much out of place but most of the rest of the women sound like Valley Girls. And, boy, they gossip! In extended scenes, they gossip! They talk behind one another's back about hair styles and personalities -- "She's so political." Stuff you could find on MySpace.
It wouldn't take much in the way of rewriting to turn this story of self-indulgent aristos at Versailles into a handful of high school kids in El Cerrito. And it didn't need to be directed by Sophia Coppola. Martha Stewart could have phoned it in while under house arrest.
I don't know which audience this was aimed at, but I can recommend it for selected groups anyway. Those youngsters who, in a recent poll, identified Toronto as a city in Italy, for example. Or the fourteen percent of us who believe Barack Obama is a Muslim. Or that majority of high school seniors unable to place the American Civil War in its correct half century. At least they'd gain some familiarity with the dress of the period French court.