Nicholas Nicastro - VIZ. ARTS . . . Marie, We Hardly Knew Ye

Marie, We Hardly Knew Ye
(Marie Antoinette, 10/30/06)
By Nicholas Nicastro

In the face of renewed popular fascination with Marie Antoinette, The New York Times suggested last Sunday that Americans are destined to empathize with a skinny, shopaholic, class-oblivious, faux-nature-loving Queen. In other words, we have become a nation of Antoinettes. The idea is superficially appealing: no matter what shenanigans were going down at the Petit Trianon, what French sans-culotte would have bothered to revolt if he could have found cheap, Chinese-made culottes at some 18th century big box store?
      But comparing American consumers to frivolous Frenchwomen (more typically, to Madame Bovary) is the tired resort of the nattering class. Antoinette invites sympathy not because she was a desperate housewife, but because she was martyred for being completely, haplessly a product of her time. Eighteenth century French aristocracy was full of other supercilious ninnies. Singling out for hatred poor, pretty Marie, who really did chaff at the precious artifice of courtly life, does seem to violate some basic standard of fairness.
      Which brings us to the precious artifice of Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette. The Coppola fille, daughter of the legendary Francis (The Godfather, Apocalypse Now) Coppola, surprised many a few years ago with her poignant Lost in Translation. She surprises again this time: where the temptation must have been strong to produce some lovely, state-televisionesque historical bon bon, Coppola strikes a curious tone here—something as loud and frivolous-seeming as a dorm room gigglefest, but with a hard, cold echo.
      How receptive viewers will be to it depends on how receptive they are to, for one example, seeing periwigged dandies prance to Siouxsie and the Banshees. Much like Baz Luhrman's Moulin Rouge!, Coppola's film will divide people by their alliances to historical literalism. Antoinette is more ambitious than Moulin Rouge, however, because it wants to be a tragedy. For this affront, the French critics booed the film at Cannes.
      Marie Antoinette (Kirsten Dunst) was an Austrian princess who was, like some pretty piece of furniture, traded, stripped, and reupholstered for marriage to the heir-apparent of France, Louis XVI (Jason Schwartzman). As imagined by Coppola, the princess goes to France much like a child suffering through a long car trip ("Are we there yet?" she actually asks). The transition to the stultifying etiquette of the French court is wrenching and absurd—a plunge down the rabbit hole to a world where much is expected but little is explained. The 15 year-old Marie, moreover, is presumed to possess all the feminine wiles necessary to coax an heir from the cold loins of young Louis. "This is ridiculous," she complains to her lady in waiting (Judy Davis). "This, Madame, is Versailles," m'lady replies.
      She adapts is by playing the superficial pleasures of luxury for all they're worth. As the Lindsay Lohan of the French court, she hits her stride at last, but at the cost of a certain necessary remoteness. Letting her taste for frocks and baubles hang out, she also wants to say "This is the real me." It's a conceit the sweet-faced, mannequinesque Dunst embodies very well. Even the inevitable scenes of Marie frolicking in her fake peasant village are sympathetically imagined, as the Queen makes it an educational experience for her young daughter. That the French people would reward such artificial naturalism with contempt is beyond her comprehension.
      The movie is sparing with the actual history. We get few intimations of trouble, nothing of famine, affairs of the necklace, tennis court oaths, or the guillotine. In this, the film probably portrays the Revolution as more of a rude shock than it really was. Coppola also spares us the horror of the end—the imprisonment, the execution of Louis, the torture of Marie's children. Yet there's undeniable terror in the way Coppola reduces the threat to a gathering wave of sound from beyond the palace walls. We've all seen more than our proper share of beheadings recently, but I was prepared for the film to go on.
      What some (or most) seem unprepared to accept are the film's anachronistic touches. We get MTV-ish jump cuts, jarring casting choices (Marianne Faithfull? Molly Shannon?), and Converse Chuck Taylors in her Majesty's shoe collection. Most of all, we get the music Coppola herself (born in 1971) must have come of age on—Bow Wow Wow, New Order, Adam and the Ants. To be sure, anybody trying to tell the story of such an iconic figure is going to have to contend with viewer's preconceptions, most of which tend to be depressingly literal. Coppola wants to use music to clear away the cliches that cling like barnacles to her subject. The trouble comes when the cure—and the Cure—becomes more of a distraction than an asset (what, no Frankie Goes to Hollywood? No Pet Shop Boys?). Sometime during yet another boozy soiree, we begin to wonder if there's a computer left on in the Hall of Mirrors, cranking through somebody's iTunes playlist.
      In Barry Lyndon, Stanley Kubrick revealed the nasty clockwork under the polished cabinet of 18th century society. Coppola lacks Kubrick's vision, but she has a refreshingly deliberate sense of pace that decants her stories and lets them breathe. Her Antoinette is a failure, but there have been successes than have been less interesting.

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