A new candlelight

Rating: 5/10 (12 July 2009)

A historic movie can be made with four intentions: to tell an exciting story, to teach history, to analyze the present by referring to the past or to shed a new light on history as it is told: deconstructing myths.
After watching Marie Antoinette is tend to believe that Sofia Coppola's intention was the latter, with the third intention as a side effect.
The movie clearly enters the discussion about the historic Marie Antoinette, who is, especially in France, seen as a reckless and spoilt half-spy, interfering with politics and who was executed rightfully after the French revolution. That last event is not even shown, but the director expects the viewer to know the end, as it is with more "things one knows about Marie Antoinette". It is even made explicit when the role itself refers to her most famous remark: "Let them eat cake!" "I never said that!" states Kirsten Dunst.
But what exactly is this new light that Coppola wishes to shine on the subject? It never becomes clear, maybe because the script is torn between staying true to history and showing a woman's coming of age.
It could have been a girl thrown into the cruel protocol of a highly organized court. But Marie Antoinette, though subjected to awful habits, never really suffers. The problem with getting pregnant from a almost impotent king troubles her and her mother, but before it becomes a life-threatening burden, history breaks in and a child is born.
To be laughed at by the rest of the court is never sketched as intolerable or the reason for her to take flight into sugar rushes, a make believe rural village or into the arms of a passing Swedish officer. She just does as all the others do at this court of leisure and endless parties.
By use of music Coppola tries to link that lifestyle to the lifestyles of the party people of today: the young and rich attending to their hairstyles, clothes, where to be with whom without one thought for the real problems of the world.
But even that analogy is never stretched to its limits: Marie Antoinette takes an interest in arts, reads Rousseau and genuinely enjoys the eggs and the milk in her life like farm resort.
So what do we end up with? A movie that never seems to know what it wants to tell: it is not history, it is only chunks of it. It's not a parallel with the present. It is not a real light on Marie Anoinette, maybe just a candlelight. And what the greatest miss is: it's not an exciting story.
Kirsten Dunst can be adorable. Some scenes are clearly charmingly improvised. And Jason Schwartzman is as dorky as Jamie Dornan is hunky. But if that is all, it is not enough.