Where's the rest of her?

Rating: 6/10 (28 April 2007)

This film is enjoyable enough for what it is: basically a character study of a misunderstood "villianess" of history. It makes you wonder who else isn't as bad as people said they were, and who wasn't so good, (Gore Vidal has made a career of this).
But two huge things are missing: the French Revolution and Marie Antoinette's greatest moments. The revolution is simply something that happens to Marie Antoinette. It doesn't happen to France. We don't get to see any of the conditions which caused it. It's just represented by a mob at the end. I guess this is absent because Marie herself never saw it: we are seeing just what she saw. But who says a film has to maintain only one perspective? We hear of some of the mean things critics are saying about Marie and how what we now call a propaganda machine was trying to destroy her. But we see nothing of the propagandists and their motivations. We see nothing of their effect on a crowd of starving, frustrated people. Why not jump back and forth to contrast the Queen's life with the state of the nation? And, of course the entire period of her captivity and her attempts to save her family are removed from the story. The death of two children even before the revolution is reduced to one- in one scene. The fate of her youngest son who "reigned" after the death of his father is unmentioned.
Versalles has a famous Hall of Mirrors. In this film, we are just looking into one of them. Where is the rest of the story?