|
 (110206)
Sofia Coppola's "Marie Antoinette" opens with a shot of the last
queen of France reclining on a chaise while a maid tends to
her feet, surrounded by a parapet of pastries. On the
soundtrack, the 1980s post-punk band Gang of Four belts out
its class-baiting, anti-consumerist anthem, "Natural's Not
in It." ("The problem of leisure/what to do for pleasure,"
it goes.) A confection herself, Marie Antoinette (Kirsten Dunst) selects a pastel-colored macaroon from a tray and
takes a nibble. The whole time she's gazing saucily at the
camera as if to ask if we'd like to make something of it.
Maybe we would.
It's funny, when it's put to you this way, how much of the
lore surrounding Marie Antoinette is dessert-related.
Combine the cream-puff fashion and design sense, the
infamous (and apocryphal) cake quip and the sweet
retaliatory indulgence of her demise, and you get a clever,
visually gorgeous theme that's both emblematic of an
unfathomable life and somehow weirdly familiar.
"Marie Antoinette" gives a wide berth to the conventions of
period dramas, especially their time-capsule remove, and
instead tries to mainline the singular personal experience
of the arch-villainess of French history (and freedom
history, for that matter). The result is a startlingly
original and beautiful pop reverie that comes very close to
being transcendent.
Since the movie's premiere at Cannes, where legend has it
was met with a chorus of boos (who was in the audience,
Robespierre?), the reaction to the movie has been polarized.
This sort of thing seems to happen a lot to big-budget,
star-studded movies that look like Hollywood but feel like
art-punk. The movie was inspired by Antonia Fraser's
biography "Marie Antoinette: The Journey," a compassionate
and thorough account (or so I understand) of the monarch's
life. But Coppola is less interested in setting the
historical record straight than in making an emotional
connection to a misunderstood young girl whose coming-of-age
took place under conditions familiar to a pampered zoo
animal.
The youngest daughter of Holy Roman Emperor Francis I and
Maria Theresa, archduchess of Austria, a 14-year-old Marie
Antoinette was shipped off to Versailles to marry the
dauphin of France, thereby securing a fragile
Franco-Austrian peace. Her mother (played by an imposing
Marianne Faithfull) warns that the French court is not like
the Austrian, and she's not kidding.
From the moment the soon-to-be dauphine steps onto French
soil, she finds herself trapped in a funhouse of bizarre
protocol. From the ritual handing-off ceremony where her new
chaperone, the Comtesse de Noailles (Judy Davis), rids her
of every last scrap of her Austrian past — including her
clothes and her puppy — almost to the day she and her
husband, Louis XVI, get packed off to Paris by an angry mob,
Marie Antoinette's life was at once cloistered and open to
the public. The massive spectacle of her quickie wedding to
the future king (played by Jason Schwartzman) is rivaled
only by her well-attended wedding night, which is kicked off
by a bed-consecration ceremony to which le tout Versailles
apparently has ringside seats. This, unfortunately for
Marie, is about as freaky as it gets. The marriage remains
unconsummated for seven years — a fact of which everyone,
her mother included, is mortifyingly well apprised.
So begins a lonely, lost Marie Antoinette's transformation
from dutiful, pliable daughter to party girl and eventual
tabloid whipping post. (Pamphlets printed on illegal presses
in Paris routinely portrayed her as a nation-bankrupting
hussy.) Trapped and powerless, she soldiers through the
marriage and succumbs to the bizarre rituals and internecine
rivalries of the court until the sudden death of the lusty
and dynamic Louis XV (Rip Torn) grants the teenage couple
the run of the country, at which point the queen begins to
close ranks.
What with the best-friend entourage (Mary Nighy as the
Princesse Lamballe and Rose Byrne as the Duchesse de
Polignac), the vindictive rival (Asia Argento as the
infamous Du Barry), the gossipy hangers-on (Molly Shannon
and Shirley Henderson as Aunt Victoire and Aunt Sophie), the
limitless credit, shopping addiction, round-the-clock
partying, reckless gambling and public dissection of her
love life, Marie Antoinette was the original teenage
celebutante princess. And who better to empathize — and feel
at home in the milieu — than Coppola? A style icon and
member of Hollywood royalty herself, she slips easily into
Marie Antoinette's beautiful, unbelievably whimsical shoes
(which were designed for the movie by Manolo Blahnik),
hooking into the soundtrack of her teenage years to impart
the experience. Incidentally, and really quite beautifully,
that particular period in pop corresponds with the
transition from post-punk to New Wave to New Romanticism;
that is to say, from yawping social criticism to desolation
to ironic baroque decadence.
Coppola has a soft spot for characters who live their lives
at once cut off from and exposed to the world. And she
captures the gilded-cage experience, in all its romantic
decadence, like nobody else. The movie is at its strongest
when it focuses on Marie Antoinette's private, sensual
world, which — as she drifts into her much-mocked
Rousseau-inspired pastoral phase, in which she attempts, in
her inimitably artificial way, to connect with her natural
self — becomes ever more abstract and cut off from reality.
Dunst's sleepy, detached quality is perfectly suited to the
character. What Marie Antoinette wants is to lose herself in
a dream.
Coppola empathizes with the queen's private suffering as
well as with her detachment but recognizes this detachment
as dangerous. At the beginning of the movie, Marie
Antoinette is 14. At the end she's 34. The country is deeply
in debt, bankrupted by excess and a foreign war (the
American Revolution) it can't afford. Meanwhile, the queen
has been trying to find herself through shopping.
This feels not so much like a warning as a melancholy and
resigned realization — which is interesting for a movie that
aligns itself so closely with punk rebellion. Toward the
end, I found myself waiting for clues to the coming eruption
of reality. But when it finally comes, it feels cursory.
Hermetically sealed inside Marie Antoinette's world, you
don't see it coming, and you don't know what to make of it
when it arrives. The hungry mob shows up waving pitchforks,
and you half wonder if perhaps they might like a piece of
cake.
|
