dir: Sofia Coppola
[img_assist|nid=842|title=You're all class, Marie|desc=|link=none|align=right|width=450|height=275]
It’s not often that a film gets more press and probably more viewers because it was booed at the most recent Cannes film festival. People who were eagerly awaiting the next Sofia Coppola film after the success of Lost in Translation were momentarily taken aback by the news of the audience reaction to a film that became notorious overnight as one of the biggest and most redolent cinematic turds of recent memory.
Having just watched Marie Antoinette, I have to wonder what flavour and quality of crack the audience members who acted like boorish slobs were smoking. The film isn’t brilliant, but it is hardly a cinematic atrocity that deserves people booing the flick when the director is sitting in the audience. That’s just rude, even if that same director was also one of the main reasons why people hate Godfather III to this day.
I saw a film with a novel premise: that Marie Antoinette was the Paris Hilton / celebutante of her days and age who lived a decadent life oblivious to the societal circumstances outside until it was way too late. And whilst watching it was a profoundly banal experience, akin to eating a kilo of fairy floss at a carnival, it doesn’t make me want to burn down theatres or effigies of the director.
It’s not a baseless idea. Depending on what you might read Antoinette was either a completely decadent moron or a hesitant but finally noble being whose bright light was cruelly snuffed by the mob, enraged by bad press and those who desired to snatch the reigns of power for themselves.
She was made the scapegoat for an enraged populace of costermongers and fishwives who were starving because of France’s war time expenses. Ironically, considering the (at least) pop cultural hatred of the Americans for the French, and vice versa, the main reason for economic hardship in France is represented as being Louis the XVI’s support of the American rebels against their British masters in their ill-fated War of Independence.
Of course the king’s coffers were emptied for a lot of reasons, mostly because of the high price of hookers and opium back then. But another reason is the constant partying and shoe shopping of Marie Antoinette.
Played appropriately by Kirsten Dunst, in that she seems to play a vapid airhead without effort, Antoinette doesn’t really do much or say much apart from a few vacuous lines here and there. It seems like a substantial proportion of the film is taken up with her trying on shoes and wigs, eating pastries and candy, and lolling about like a person who’s never had to work a day in her life. As the film shows, and numerous books, she knew nothing and cared nothing for the outside world, and lived the kind of life of privilege that seems to provoke revulsion and revolution in the peasantry.
But she’s not a villain, at least she’s nothing more than a class villain. Sure, she partied whilst people starved to death, but so do the rest of us. I tuck in to $90 single malt whiskies and smoke $30 cigars on occasion whilst people are starving to death in Somalia, North Korea and Broadmeadows, but you don’t see me losing any sleep over it. If anything that knowledge makes me savour the good stuff even more because no-one but the Tax department can take it away from me.
The scenes of partying and trying on shoes, admittedly, was excruciating for me because, well, I hope this won’t come as a shock to anyone, but I’m neither a teenage girl nor a gay man. I have nothing against teenage girls or gay men, far from it, I find them delectable in their own ways, but I would have to be one, the other, or both to enjoy scenes like that drawn out as if to be a test.
Of course such stuff is anachronistic in the sense that whilst I’m sure in some fashion that similar stuff happened in the life of the Airhead Dauphine and then Queen of France, the manner in which it is depicted, and the soundtrack is continually meant to remind us of the contemporary world.
Antoinette’s famous line ‘let them eat cake’ is deconstructed and treated within the film as if it is a tabloid rumour put out by the hungry media. In conversation with one of her lackeys the little queen specifically talks about it as if it were a malicious lie printed in the pages of one of those idiotic magazines whose stories are entirely made up yet women still purchase at the supermarket.
As such a creation, in Coppola’s hands, we are not meant to hate or have contempt for Antoinette. We’re meant to find her charming and sweet in a painfully strict and ultimately brutal world not of her making. But it’s hard to say how much sympathy one can really muster for such a vacuous waste of space and fabric.
I can’t really point to any problems with the acting, except maybe with Jason Schwartzman as Louis XVI, who is quite boring. And Dunst plays her character at least sweetly. And the various hangers-on seem adequate for what is required. Particularly strong are Steve Coogan, playing it straight for once as the Austrian ambassador, and Danny Huston as Antoinette’s brother Josef. I would have preferred seeing more from both of them, especially if it meant less of the rest of the harridans onscreen.
Speaking of harridans, Asia Argento, truly the sluttiest and druggiest looking woman in all of cinema, who always remains never less than compelling, is given nothing to do as Louis XV’s mistress the evil Comtesse Du Barry. All she does is swan around in darker clothing and make evil eyes at the sweet young thing, which unintentionally makes it look like she wants to fuck her. Maybe that was the plan; my grasp on the history is shaky at best. But she’s a waste of satin and space.
There are some pluses. They actually filmed it at Versailles, which looks amazing. The cinematography is pretty good, and makes everything look as sweet as candy. The soundtrack, with plenty of Cure, Siouxsie and the Banshees, New Order, Gang of Four and other decent songs from the 80s (not the cliché ones), is probably the most successful part of the film. But is also reminds you that you’re watching a pantomime.
It’s just very hard to care. It’s ironic that as a record of parts of Antoinette’s life, it almost works as a documentary, since much of it is based on fact. But as an interesting and engaging film, it’s something of a failure.
Not a failure that renders the film a completely painful experience or a waste of celluloid, DVD or the rays that comprise a Blu-Ray disk. But it is a flick that doesn’t really convince you it’s worth two hours of your life.
Whatever my complaints might be, there’s nothing here that deserved the Cannes reaction that it got. All I can attribute the brouhaha to is a local (French) overreaction to the temerity of an American director and crew having the gall to make a film about a French icon. This film doesn’t provoke boos and screams of rage. It provokes yawns. Maybe angry yawns, but yawns all the same.
5 times that I’ve become painfully aware how precious time has become out of 10
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“Letting everyone down would be my greatest unhappiness.” – Marie Antoinette.
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