Privileged aimlessness

Rating: Null/10 (9 December 2011)

The whole point here is that it would be an aimless, frivolous film because it would be about aimless, frivolous lives. It was meant to be perfectly centered in excess, vacuous stultifying excess, and to the degree that it is, it's a successful venture.
There are hints of political machinations at work, the wheels of a larger world with this woman at the center of empires, or near it, but they only reach us faintly through the silken curtains, until of course too late when they come marching out the window with torches and pitchforks at hand; again, it is kind of the point that we are as removed from the real world as possible.
And the soundtrack of modern music, this perhaps above all, is a great touch to make us once more experience the gilded dream from inside; a world that is not historically embalmed, a series of museum exhibits, but vividly modern, contemporary, as felt at the time.
So in all the parts that are meant to convey a world, it's a well structured film. But it does remain a film with the gaze solely invested in this particular world, this particular woman.
Sofia likely thought she could personally identify with the material from her own life sheltered in wealth and fame, with its own anxieties and despairs, and carve from those a portrait that would be honest and heartfelt, if nothing else, which is even more troubling the more I think about it, because no doubt she knew we would identify herself in the film, how wistfully she portrays this woman. So exactly because none of the real issues faced then in Paris or elsewhere should be shown to intrude the chic decadence of the palace, it is asserted that there's no real responsibility to be accepted or the lack of it regretted for the kind of life shown here.
What is mostly meant to preoccupy here, is some sense of quiet suffering at the heart of that privileged aimlessness. We're meant to understand how even a pampered queen can have problems, oh my, which renders the few tears shed here and there a kind of crocodilian self-congratulation; "see, I have my own price to pay".
I would have loved to be able to see this with Eisenstein; if only, for getting to note how a montage can shape from nothing a life that is nothing and allow the filmmaker to celebrate this as a kind of meaningful art.