Marie Antoinette
is covered in frosting, but the cake seems to be missing.
The highly anticipated third film by writer-director Sofia Coppola,
Marie Antoinette
is visually one of the most arresting pieces of the year. The film oozes style and artistry from every pore but falls desperately behind in depth, character
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development and story. While production designer KK Barrett and costume designer Milena Canonero
deserve accolades for the beauty of
Marie Antoinette
, the director bears responsibility for its painful shallowness.
Heralded for her keen depictions of young women in
The Virgin Suicides
and
Lost in Translation
, Coppola seemed naturally suited to tell the story of one of history's most notorious ladies. Shipped from Austria to France at 15 and, at 19, crowned queen of one of the most famously decadent regimes in history, Marie Antoinette's story could not be more intriguing. Coppola prefers a simmered-down version of Marie Antoinette's life, insisting on imposing the ennui of a modern teenager on her historical figure. Aside from sex, parties and shopping, little else is explored.
The majority of the film revolves weakly around Marie Antoinette (Kirsten Dunst) and her husband, Louis XVI's (Jason Schwartzman), four-year inability to consummate their marriage and produce an heir. To fill her time, she shuns politics for ruffles and lace, drinks champagne and nibbles on macaroons. After her first child, her famous hairdo falls and she turns transcendental, reading Rousseau to her friends, languishing in Le Petit Trianon and collecting eggs from her chickens.
Coppola's hands-over-the-ears insistence that Marie Antoinette was an unpretentious foreigner on a youth's quest for fun and beauty reveals the director's own bourgeois preoccupation with the good life. In a telltale exchange between Marie Antoinette and her advisor, the young queen responds to the social unrest of the country by telling the royal jeweler to stop sending her diamonds and
retreats back to the palace. When next faced with the public's growing suffering and disdain for her, she chooses not to acknowledge it, as if the pursuit of happiness is justification for a queen's selfish excess and convenient political ignorance. In yet another attempt to free Marie
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Antoinette from centuries of bad press, Coppola cites the American Revolution as the cause for the French deficit.
Whereas her previous films captured the seminal, emotional stages of her heroines, Coppola's depiction of Marie Antoinette is distant and two-dimensional, the queen's pathos thrown aside for inserted shots of fabulous cakes and shoes, set to the Bow Wow Wows' "I Want Candy." Dunst, while a beguiling figure to play dress-up with, appears incapable of facial expression. Rather mercifully, the film's sparse dialogue saves us from too much of her valley girl manner of speech.
The most engaging moments of the film depict Versailles' preoccupation with ceremony. Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI are deposited in their marriage bed by an entourage including Louis XV (Rip Torn), several altar boys and a bishop. The next morning, Marie Antoinette shivers as ladies of rank divvy up the honor of dressing her. Finally receiving her garments, she poses stiffly with her husband at a table laden with the most impossible delicacies. This sequence of events is repeated often, with little variation, making "What's for lunch?" more interesting than the characters themselves.
Overwhelming, gilded sets (mostly shot on location in Versailles) and breathtaking panoramas of the gardens and rising palaces prove that Barrett and cinematographer Lance Acord understand how to film an epic, even if Coppola does not. Without the billowing, sculptural brilliance of Canonero's dress designs and Pascale Bouquière's flattering makeup, there would be nothing to see. Coppola seems to think this thickly frosted cake is enough, as if moviegoers prefer inches of icing to actual substance.