you cannot stay indifferent to this Marie Antoinette

Rating: 6/10 (24 July 2008)

For those who come to see this movie with the expectation of seeing some historical drama or biography, this is a very different and special experience. Sofia Coppola in 'Marie Antoinette' takes the pretext of the life of the famous and infamous last queen of France and makes out of it a drama about the solitude of a young girl in a strange environment. Acted superbly by Kirsten Dunst Coppola's Marie Antoinette looks at some instances like a teenager today with modern haircut, closer to Scarlett Johansson's character in 'Lost in Translation' than to the historical character. Is the experiment successful on all plans? Certainly not, as the film gets too much into the details of the life at the court, of the garments and chocolates and interior decoration, at the expense of the differentiation of the characters that surround Marie Antoinette. So much is the movie centered around her that it is hard to distinguish the other characters around. The usage of punk music has a strong effect at the start, plays well in the ball scene, but starts to fit well later and becomes too repetitive. What we get overall is an interesting and different movie, but not a perfect one.