supreme Kirsten Dunst

Rating: 9/10 (7 October 2009)

This is the latest movie by Sophia Coppola and the first I saw, instilling in me the will to see the two previous ones. Needless to say, the protagonists in all three movies, are women, young women, living in an always definite environment, a hostile environment, being it the royal Palace of Versailles or a metropolis of today (Lost in translation), or a common American suburb in the 70's (The virgin suicides). The young girls are always alone, feel entrapped, oppressed and not understood by the nearest ones. This is evident also in Marie Antoinette, where we are not asked to take historical facts into account, the movie scores on history and politics, they do not matter, we are asked to enter the world of an adolescent, to feel empathy with a girl who was purchased at the age of 14 to become a queen, to be a wife, to bear an heir, never allowing her to be a teenager. And we are able to do this in such a natural way: in an exterior world made of feasts, banquets, cakes, colourful dresses, we can perceive, besides Marie's fun and lust, her deep solitude and suffering. Kirsten Dunst is simply perfect: her naturally attractive and powerful mixture of innocence and yearning for experience, of joy and sadness, emerging from a single glimpse of her eye, make her interpretation supreme.
Much negative criticism had been spread around this bio-pic: use of punk-rock music as inappropriate, anachronistic dresses since dyed in colours that could not be achieved at those times, a general boring tone which too brashly disregards history. I totally disagree: that kind of music helps underline the modernity and actuality of feelings which always affect being an adolescent, the overcoloured and over elaborated dresses (wonderful, to say the least), represent a very effective means to contrast the exterior pomp with the inner suffering of the heroine, and the overall tone, disregarding politics and historical facts, is obviously searched for, in order to focus attention on the real protagonist: Marie as a young French girl.