More films-just for Francophiles.
No one in current American cinema films young women like Sofia Coppola. Kirsten Dunst's dawn awakening on the football field in
The Virgin Suicides
and a pink undies-clad Scarlett Johansson gazing out a hotel window in
Lost in Translation
are two of the most evocative snapshots recent film has given us of girls negotiating the brink of womanhood: This was the niche Coppola, with her first two movies, had fashioned for herself: visual poet of poor little rich girls.
Critics expecting Coppola's third effort,
Marie-Antoinette
(scheduled to open Oct. 20) to be a meaty period piece about the young Austrian-turned-controversial-French-queen were cranky after it showed at Cannes last May; the French sniffed at a lack of history, while Americans griped about a lack of plot. At a press conference, Coppola responded to the haters essentially by rolling her eyes and flipping her hair, stopping just short of muttering, "Whatever." Fair enough; those people were barking up the wrong tree.
Marie-Antoinette
, like
Coppola's first two movies, is above all a captivating-and sometimes frustrating-exercise in atmosphere, and an impressionistic study of an adolescent girl flailing through the transition to adulthood.
The film kicks off with a 14-year-old Marie-Antoinette (Kirsten Dunst) being pushed from her native Austria into the filthy rich bubble of Versailles, where she is received
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with a toxic mix of ceremony and contempt. Coppola doesn't give a hoot about M-A's historical
significance or her political position; she wants us to feel the loneliness of a girl plucked prematurely from childhood, handed a role and a husband she never asked for, and dropped into a world whose intricate web of customs she barely understands.
From that point on,
Marie-Antoinette
turns into a vivid portrait of teenage escapism: Our young queen-in-training, reeling from dislocation, sinks languorously into a cycle of parties, clothes and gambling. The only thing that seems to kill M-A's buzz is the pressure of providing France with an heir-in other words, get the sexually indifferent Louis XVI (Jason Schwartzman, in a witty performance) to knock her up.
Coppola's Versailles is both delicious and monstrous-an aesthetic paradise laced with middle school bitchiness-and she films it with such relish you can almost taste the pastries and champagne.
Coppola has, in the three films she's made thus far, revealed a skittish relationship with narrative. She prefers mood to dialogue and character, and here one might crave a bit more story to go with all the props and costumes. But Coppola is such an assured crafter of images, and the flashes of M-A that she gives us-rolling around on an impeccably trimmed lawn; running daintily down a long corridor; soaking in a bath, hung-over; nervously bowing before the French masses-are so rapturously imagined, that the film, for all its detachment, becomes a unique and seductive experience. It's like a period piece on Ecstasy.
If
Marie-Antoinette
works as well as it does, it's in large part thanks to Dunst. There's nothing fussy about her M-A-no affected accent or manner-but she inhabits the character down to the smallest physical gesture (the way she reaches toward a tray of sweets, for example) and shift in emotion (watch her in the final scene, as the carriage pulls away from Versailles for the last time). Never has a role been better suited to the streak of melancholy that makes Dunst a more interesting actress than her airiness might suggest.
Marie-Antoinette
may not be a particularly deep or complex film, but it's something new: a historical costume drama that feels distinctly personal. Sofia Coppola can't seem to get enough of these sad young women, and it's probably time for her to tell other stories. But it's also this uncommon empathy between filmmaker, actress, and subject that gives Coppola's new cream puff of a movie a surprisingly lasting aftertaste.
PLUS:
For those who like subtitles and sexy French actors playing out various states of psychological torment, the fall looks to be a promising time. There's Patrice Chéreau's
Gabrielle
, a dynamic but stylistically mannered interpretation of a Joseph Conrad short story, "The Return," in which a woman (played by the incomparably chilly and precise Isabelle Huppert) sends her husband (Pascal Greggory) into a confused rage by leaving him and coming back mere hours later.
Better than that is Domink Moll's
Lemming
, a creepy, darkly comic thriller pitched somewhere between the upper-class sexual anxiety of Eyes Wide Shut and a David Lynch nightmare. The film is about a couple (Laurent Lucas and Charlotte Gainsbourg) whose storybook yuppie life begins to unravel after: a) they discover a pesky little rodent blocking up a pipe under their sink; and b) the husband's boss (André Dussollier) comes to dinner with his poisonously bitter wife (Charlotte Rampling). Nothing makes much sense or ends up meaning anything in particular, but Moll builds dread with real verve and the actors (particularly the two Charlottes) are mesmerizing.
Best of all is André Téchiné's latest,
Changing Times
, in which Catherine Deneuve and Gérard Depardieu play ex-lovers reunited-after 30 years and under bizarre circumstances-in Tangiers, Morocco. The premise is pure supermarket romance novel, yet Téchiné coaxes it into a rich, vibrant meditation on the possibility of change. Surrounding the central couple are friends, family members, lovers and an entire city, Tangiers, all in the throes of transition. Bon appétit!
