This movie really stayed with me...

Rating: 7/10 (12 September 2006)

The whole time I was watching Sofia Coppola's take on the famously ill-fated Queen of France I felt like I was missing something. This came close to hampering my enjoyment of the film, but I must admit that it was this sensation that has caused my mind to linger over the aims and intentions of the film long after I left the screening. Coppola has taken a decidedly idiosyncratic stance on Marie Antoinette's years as a monarch at Versailles, and her youthful, teen-aged approach to her subject goes quite some way to reclaiming a much-maligned character.
Kirsten Dunst is transfixing as Marie Antoinette, and the film is relentlessly focused on her performance; mirroring the intense focus of the French Aristocracy on their new monarch. There are some great supporting performances (Rip Torn and Asia Argento amuse as the old King and his common lover) and some not-so-great (Jason Schwartzman - an actor I love - is somewhat miscast as the shyly impotent Louis XVI) but what is important is that the support remains as support, never distracting from Dunst's stellar performance.
Filmed on location at Versailles, the film has a rivetingly lavish style overflowing in elegance, but never more beautiful than in the sequence where the Queen sets up her own self- consciously romantic idyll in the form of a rustic village in the grounds of the palace. One of the key criticisms levelled at the historical Marie Antoinette is her extravagant spending in the face of the poverty of the French People and the debt of the monarchy itself. This is the one accusation that it is hardest to answer in defence of Marie Antoinette, and yet in displaying the lush surroundings of Versailles in such minutely sublime detail, Coppola makes it obvious how hard it must have been for a girl of such a young age to align in her mind the warnings of the financial state of her country given her by her husband and ministers with the supremely extravagant lifestyle led by all at court.
Sofia Coppola brings to the story of Marie Antoinette a vibrancy that is rarely seen in period dramas, and her decision to focus solely on the years at Versailles and not dwell on the path well travelled by dragging on to the Queen's well-documented fate will leave you pondering the social justice meted out to her and her family by the French Revolution.