A Piece of Candy

Rating: 7/10 (13 March 2007)

Those who want to learn the history of Marie Antoinette will not find it in Sofia Coppola's film.
This movie raised more questions than it answered for me. I didn't know much of anything about this famous French monarch, other than that she was eventually beheaded (which is not shown in the film) and that Norma Shearer starred in a 1938 version of her story. I did a little bit of reading about Marie Antoinette after seeing Coppola's movie and decided that Coppola took much too frivolous an approach to the material. Many of the details about Marie Antoinette's life as first wife of the dauphin and then queen are present, but if you don't know her story before watching the film, they may slide right past you without notice, even some quite significant ones. Coppola doesn't provide an historical context in which to place the film's action; therefore, we understand that certain things are important without understanding why. Why, for example, do the French end up hating her and Louis XVI so much? What mistakes do they make as leaders that drives their country to such a desperate point? The film ends with the king and queen fleeing the palace of Versailles -- there's a heck of a lot of story left to tell after that event, but it's not recorded here. I suspect Coppola was trying to put us in the queen's place -- she was a young, immature girl who was thrust into a position for which she was not emotionally ready. In the film, politics bore her, and she would much rather buy clothes and gossip. The job of running a country remains a vague nuisance pushed into the background. But this point of view approach backfires. We don't learn enough about what's at stake to ever feel especially concerned about Marie Antoinette or what happens to her, and the character itself isn't vivid.
So why am I ultimately recommending the film? Because it's lively, colorful and extremely well directed. It reminded me of Kubrick's "Barry Lyndon": there's no substance to the movie, but it's so meticulously detailed in its production design, and it so faithfully recreates the rituals of 18th Century France, that it's absolutely fascinating on those terms alone. I enjoyed the anachronisms Coppola brings to the film: Kirsten Dunst, playing the title role, and Jason Schwartzman, as Louis XVI, speak in a slangy American dialect that doesn't even attempt to convince us that either of them is European; in one scene, during a flashy montage showing Antoinette and her female cohorts enjoying the frivolity and excess for which she was so notorious, we get a glimpse of Converse sneakers discarded in the background; and most notably, most of the soundtrack consists of contemporary pop tunes that comment on the action, and if they frequently take the burden of telling the story away from Coppola and her actors, they're also a lot of fun.
Ultimately, "Marie Antoinette" resembles one of the many gooey, decadent candies that the queen consumes throughout the film -- completely lacking in substance, but lovely to look at and perfectly suited to satisfy a craving for something sweet.
Grade: A-