Such sad bonbons

Rating: 8/10 (22 September 2006)

Audacious, delicious, exaggerated and preposterous, Sofie Coppola's third film, Marie Antoinette, plunges into the life of the Austrian princess who became queen of France and was beheaded in the Revolution, following Antonia Fraser's recent biography in describing her as a frustrated, lonely, brave teenager who never ceased to be a child and achieved maturity just in time to die. The film is a grandiose, sometimes touching, sometimes indigestible mixture. Starting with Kirsten Dunst, a splendid actress, very touching in her openness (but does she know what it's like to become a queen?) and the sleek, stolid Jason Schwartzman, a slacker-seeker now turned teenage king. Shot largely at Versailles, it's lavish and authentic visually (or authentic-feeling; furniture and clothing had to be invented), but the film's French characters speak in English and American accents and the musical background is full of Eighties pop. Fruit of a girlish fantasy, it's a symphony of eye candy and real candy, bonbons and pinks and bright colors, a glorious superficial panorama that seeks to be a deep personal portrait of a tormented life. Perhaps 7.5/10 for screenplay, but the dazzle-factor counts for a lot.
Ms. Coppola would have none of the sepia tones of historical "Masterpiece Theater" productions; but this isn't such a boldly original step as the film's promoters imply and the director herself acknowledges a debt to Kubrick's Barry Lynden (and used the latter's costume designer). Frears's brilliant 1988 Dangerous Liaisons comes to mind, similarly light and bright. It's also true that Marie's somewhat crude dialogue suffers by comparison with Christopher Hampton's sharp adaptation of Choderlos de Laclos. The talk in Marie is factual, or telegraphs information. The new film doesn't evoke the wit and sophistication of the eighteenth century. The story, so detailed at first, seems rushed more and more as it goes on. But still it leaves you with something. And that something may be Louis and Marie going to bed  and nothing happening, night after night. They didn't produce a child and maybe didn't even have real completed sex for the first seven years. One comes to feel sorry for Louis too: there's something helpless and sweet about Schwartzman that makes the seemingly odd casting eventually pay off.
Coppola negotiates a narrow line between spectacle and intimate story. Some of the moments are bombastic, as when the father Louis XV (Rip Torn) or some chief of protocol stamps a staff on the floor, reams of Manohlo Blahnik shoes or pretty pastries flow by our eyes, we get a vast panorama of Versailles or a huge elephant in our face, or a blast of organ music knocks us out of our seats. There are many royal eating scenes, the couple facing forward with vast symmetrical arrangements of food in front of them with the courses loudly announced, as in Rossellini's La Prise du Pouvoir par Louis XIV. Unlike Rossellini, Coppola doesn't strive for an alienation effect but wants us to identify with the fourteen-year-old Austrian girl from the moment she has everything taken away from her, even her dog, and is dressed in French clothes to meet the Dauphin.
We're not very aware of the passage of time  Coppola's movie tries too hard to avoid historical-film convention for that  but our heroine goes through some heavy changes. She drinks and takes drugs (what's in that pipe the women pass we don't know), she stays up all night, sneaks to Paris in disguise for a masked ball, squanders millions on landscaping (which merely embellished Le Nôtre's designs) and clothes and gambles and wolfs down so many sweets you wonder how he could get into those tight bodices. She gets heavily into the Pastoral shepherdess scene and then has an affair with a sexy Swedish count, Axel von Ferson, played by Jamie Dornan, a former Calvin Klein model with long limbs and dreamy eyes, right out of a soap opera, or the cover of a pulp romance. The way the movie shows it, this indiscretion was soon over; weren't there plenty more? Somehow there isn't time to show, with all the costumes and bonbons. This is where the movie most falls short: on a sense of events unfolding outside, or even inside; it's high on the emotions and the visuals, which never cease to be fun. Even when king and queen are driving away to be beheaded, Marie is looking out the window to admire the gardens. We get some court intrigue, notably conflict with Louis XV (Rip Torn)'s mistress Madame du Barry, played by Asia Argento as a vampire of a vamp. Ever present as a mean schoolmistress is the chief of etiquette, Comtesse de Noailles (Judy Davis), forever frowning and stretching her long thin neck. And Marie's female play pals are lovely and cool.
Ultimately if all this elaborate stuff stands or falls with Kirsten Dunst, then it's at least okay, because Ms. Dunst has innocence and freshness and aloneness about her, and she's got the freshTeutonic looks Marie's Austrian background requires, and young as she is, she's got the energy and presence of an experienced actress. This isn't a great movie but it's a fabulous one. I dare costume-historical queens to stay away.
The screenplay really only rates a 6 or a 7, but the dazzle-factor of the mise-en-scene is so great I'll be nice and award the film an 8.