Sex (less?) on a Huge Bed.

Rating: 8/10 (9 January 2012)

I just now saw this 6 years old film. It still looks very nice. Gorgeous paintings of that famous (infamous?) Versailles period in every frame, just before the French Revoution terminated all that in a blood bath (Guillotine for everyone, including later for most of the revolutionaries that dethroned Marie Antoinette's King husband, herself, family and friends).
I read some of the reviews and many of them are such a scream that I couldn't stop laughing. For example, they say that this movie was an experiment by Sofia Coppola where she compares contemporary adolescent Angst with an adolescent Queen from Versailles and that the contemporary music clarifies that concept making the union between Marie Antoinette's eighteen century and our present next door troubled teenager perfectly clear for any informed person... (shame on you if you didn't get this previous information).
That's nice.
Pity that Coppola didn't incorporate her thesis in a less cryptic message, since her movie is a perfectly conventional period piece (contemporary music alone won't make ANY connexion as a Time Machine subterfuge).
Another thing: The clothes were absolutely breathtaking (each scene Marie Antoinette is seen with another outfit, and what an outfit!!!) "This thing? --she will say-- I just found this thing in the closet"... (no, I'm kidding, she has never said that).
The food shots run into the thousands and the Home Economist/s that prepare them must have had a ball, because their resources were obviously tremendous.
And watching these darlings stuffing their faces with all that food piling up or toppling down from silver/gold trays placed all over, and apparently eating non stop from morning to next morning (they seemed to live entirely for pleasure and never slept) one wonders how could they hold all that volume of food in their incredible 18 inches waistlines... (I know, they were corseted to death, but corsets can go only that far..., the rest has to burst out in some other unexpected places...).
And then we have the issue of authenticity: It's notorious the lack of personal hygiene as close to us as the beginning of the XXth Century, same with laundering (then done by hand by laborious washer women) so, how come they wore (in the film) those fabulous SPOTLESS garments, many of the gorgeous fabrics machine embroidered (?) wrinkle free (?), hems impeccable (they didn't walk only on polished multicolored marble floors, because again, we know through historical research that these aristocrats would squat down on the marble stairs and do all their bodily needs there (neither toilet paper nor bidets were available then as incredible as it seems now to anybody living in a civilized country) so they would get up and continue walking and talking as if nothing happened and obviously without ever looking back (the train of their dresses took care of that).
According to very serious historians, the smells in Palace where nothing comparable to Chanel #5... and that, next to unwashed armpits (not mentioning more alarming body creases...), terrible dental conditions --diseased gums and teeth-- will make us say, as W.C. Fields stated on his tombstone: "I Rather Be in Philadelphia".
Should a period movie disregard these facts as too crude for our contemporary sense of prudery and give us just colorful Fashion Plates to delight our senses or should they instruct us in the true facts of life as it was lived then?
British designers for period wardrobe --and hairstyles, make up, etc.-- in the movies, are the best for period authenticity right now, they make a great deal of research to produce the most authentic garments and general ambiance.
I think this "Authentic versus Bogus period thing" is a question opened for debate.
"Marie Antoinette" is a visually glorious movie and quite entertaining if you only want a Reader's Digest Summary of that particular French period in their history, and very-very pretty shots.