Missed Opportunity for Creating an Interesting Satire

Rating: 3/10 (19 July 2010)

I think if Coppola had been conscious of making a satire of modern, vapid, bored Hollywood royalty, then this could have been a great film, almost a Buñuelian effort. But as it is, her inability to judge her characters, or to comment on their lifestyle and politics, makes this not only a bad film, but an offensive film. Her comment in an interview sums up her attitude: "I was reading Antonia Fraser's biography, and I found out that Marie Antoinette was just a lonely, misunderstood teenager when she came to Versailles!" To recognize the parallel between her own life and Marie Antoinette's is interesting. To fail to draw any conclusions about what that life means is a failure of imagination and intelligence. All I could really get from it was that it's fun to live in a palace and to have pretty cakes and clothes. Such a premise could actually make for an interesting art film that flouts history, but it doesn't work on this level, partly because it was made as a straight historical biography rather than as a personal art piece.