Marie Antoinette (2006)

i know some people have said that it is entirely eye candy (and what amazing eye candy at that) but it actually does an artful adaptation of the book, which i read before seeing the film. it includes many of the important, beautiful, and sad parts of the book without getting bogged down with all the particulars and names like many of the period movies do. the soundtrack is great, a clever blend of 18th century and modern...the parts are well acted and the American accents rarely detract. If you want a historical account of her life, read the book...if you want Versailles and Marie Antoinette brought to life in a heart-breakingly beautiful fashion, go see this film...it is truly one of the most visually stunning movies i have ever seen.

Fmovies: Having trashed two of the three movies Sofia Coppola has directed (I didn't see Lick the Star, yuck!) what made me think I'd enjoy Marie Antoinette? I'm old and worse yet, a male. Certainly not the demographic Marie Antoinette is aimed at, so I found when I ventured out to my local Cineplex to check out Ms. Coppola's 4th go at directing. I figured to use the theater as my personal screening-room on a Friday at noon. Oops! It was a school holiday and I entered one of the smaller of the 14 "theaters" into a crowd of a dozen or so chatting high school girls. I had mistakenly arrived 20 minutes early so I had an opportunity to eavesdrop on their discussion concerning the ethics paper they were required to write and what they were considering giving up for a week as required by their class. These must have been students at the nearby parochial high school. What public high school has ethic courses? They seemed a perfect audience for a film on Marie Antoinette. The theater continued to fill as film time approached. It filled to approximately ¾ capacity and I was, as best as I could determine, the only male person of my gender.

So why did I think I'd enjoy a film by a director whose films seemed directed by a person with a spoiled child's view of the world? Well, what I'd read about Marie Antoinette resonated close enough with Moulin Rouge, Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge which blew me away. "Lavish imagery and a daring soundtrack set this film apart from most period dramas; in fact, style complete takes precedence over plot and character development in Coppola's vision of the doomed queen" should sound familiar to Moulin Rouge fans.

Well, as soon as the black and shocking pink credits showed up to the sound of The Gang of Four's "Natural's Not In It" I knew I was in the right place. Kirsten Dunst was, in my opinion, a perfect choice. She's beautiful but not too beautiful. She has an aura of mischievousness which worked from start to finish. Ms. Dunst, at the young age of 24 or so, already has a long career in Hollywood. And she was only one of many. From Marianne Faithful, to Judy Davis, to Rip Torn, to Jason Schwartzman, to Asia Argento, to many others perfectly cast.

For me, the film never dragged or bogged down. The sets were beautiful. (What can you say about Versailles and the French countryside?) The food was reminiscent to me of Wayne Thiebaud paintings, but more colorful. The costumes, the music, added to the sense of decadence I think the film aimed for.

Yet Marie Antoinette's character never seemed decadent. Ms. Dunst's openness and delight in all presented to her, came across. Despite her loss of freedom and the difficulty in eventually becoming the Queen of France she was able to "Party On!"

What made the film, for me, exceptional, was how Sofia Coppola was able to make both Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI living, breathing, human beings, rather than grotesqueries. I was moved several times by their connection or lack of the same.

There is a lot to see, hear and experience in Marie Antoinette. It is an accomplished and stimulating cinematic experience. I shall view it as much as I am able. This film has prompted me to review both The Virgin Suicides and Lost in Translation. The world is certainly in need of feminine perspective and Sofia Coppola has made a statement that she has the potential to be a very Great talent.

Pardon my verbosity.

I have seen this film yesterday after a lot of hype up and waiting since in my little town everything comes out a month after the release date. I was looking forward to seeing this movie..a lot. But I must say that the trailers I had seen and the film have a completely different feeling. This isn't a bad film but I think that it well get a lot of criticism for not being historically accurate, not serious enough, being too long, being 'unfinished'... but those are not he bad points of this movie. The style is original and Sofia Coppola succeeds at showing Marie Antoinette's personal side. Her suffering through gossip and humiliation by her husbands lack of 'interest' in her etc. She succeeds in showing Marie Antoinette as a naive girl in the beginning..who hugs her first lady, cries at parting with her dog and announcing that the morning ceremonials are ridiculous. We see Marie Antoinette at the beginning trying to fit in with the strict life at Versailles but further on it's clear that with the gossip following her she stops caring and starts to have fun her own way which leads to her ruin. The negative points of the film is that Sofia Coppola uses the same techniques, the same scenes through out the movie. The trying on of shoes, the hairdressing, the patisserie dishes and the champagne. We see Marie Antoinette frolicking around in the grass too many times. Sofia Coppola apparently tried to show a girl out of touch with reality who lives just to have fun..to escape the wagging tongues of Versailles. But if that was her point the film should've ended long before. This is a biography of Marie Antoinette...even though not a completely serious or historically accurate one...but if Sofia Coppola is trying to show this French queens personality and human side then I can assure you there was more to her than the frilly lace, the satin shoe, the bakery department and the champagne. Marie-Antoinette was a mother who cared about her children and was involved with them..though we hardly we see this in the film except the sequence of her and her daughter on the farm. The relationship and the feelings she had for her husband aren't very clear and his for her aren't very much elucidated. This is a visually beautiful film but I think Sofia Coppola could've delved deeper into this rich personality. In the end you're left with the impression of stepping out from a hazy rose petal fragile dream that from someones tumultuous life. But a dream that's still worth seeing.

Marie Antoinette fmovies. Sophia Coppola really seems to know how to ruin a potentially great movie concept. Marie Antoinette is a fascinating figure in European history and one would expect the movie to account for at least a few interesting things that happened when she came to France to live with the prince. What we see is another sugarcoated Hollywood movie which is pretty much exactly like those teen highschool movies where rich young girls gossip, obsess with fashion and popularity etc. The only difference here are the costumes and the fact that not all the women in this movie are as young.

To top it off, the soundtrack...well, let me first put it this way, as a stand alone compilation, it's terrific to listen to but the way the modern tunes and songs have been incorporated in the sequences looks ill fit. It looks like a the characters have gone to a current day costume party rather than a movie of the period. Moreover, Coppola fails to draw the body language and nuances of the French culture from her actors. Not once does one get the impression that this is a story about France. As a result of bad direction and terrible writing, the performances of the actors suffer even though Kirsten Dunst does the best she could with the given material.

The director portrays Antoinette as naive and frivolous. There is no mention of her historical accomplishments or failures. Now it isn't an easy task to convincingly tell the story of a historical figure in two hours but Coppola focuses the entire two hours on Antoinette being fascinated by her riches and partying around. A competent director and writer could have done so much more with the storytelling. In the current case, only near the very end things start to move along but here too the story speeds up at such a superfast pace that the ending is extremely abrupt and contrived.

'Marie Antoinette' is like a bad birthday present that is wrapped beautifully but once unwrapped, the gift itself is far from satisfactory.

and when she gets there, she gets bored, gossips, reads Rousseau, and has beach-blanket pot parties in Amadeus outfits. I did like the music, there is one inspired masked ball and a good "watch the sun rise" scene - the strength of this film is its connection to high school culture, seen through the eyes of a sweet, utterly conventional and finally boring teenage girl, projected from the California suburbs onto 18th century France. This is obviously also the film's weakness: this movie is a beautiful, expensive still life that knows nothing at all about French history, Europe, the Revolution, the Bourbons, how the ancien regime worked, how incompetent wars and not Marie Antoinette's Imelda-Marcos-like shoe fetish ran up the debt, about the conflict in North America with England and Spain, about how leading members of French government actually had brains - the films displays a nitwit, decadent, wig-loving, golden-furniture France as though seen by a France-hater in the Bush administration. As my brother pointed out, the movie also blew the subject of a potentially great movie, which is Marie Antoinette's inspired, sometimes brilliant defense of herself at her later trial. Trying to learn about what happened to the French court from this film is like trying to learn about American corporate culture by watching J.R Ewing's 30 second business deals at the Cattlemen's Club on Dallas. Well sure, politics wasn't the subject of the movie, but why is the "chick stuff" buried in diamonds and champagne? That makes these women seem way less tough and intelligent than they actually were in the bloody contact sport of French court politics. As an American watching this in Paris I was struck by the film's lack of historical, political, and cultural sophistication, in which Dunst is in every single frame and it's all one gigantic royal slumber party until the peasants show up in an illiterate wordless mass baying for bread and blood and shaking their satanic harvesting tools. Ouch: The film makes the most sense as a weird allegory of Hollywood inbreeding.

Based on the recent Marie-Antoinette biography by Antonia Fraser, Sofia Coppola's film focuses on the personal qualities of the character of Marie-Antoinette and thus participates in the character's historical rehabilitation. Antoinette is seen as a respectful loyal daughter, a loving mother, a patient wife, who had to withstand a flood of vindictive criticism since the moment she set foot in the French court. This depiction contrasts strongly with many prior representations of the character in film ("The Affair of the Necklace" for example), which show her as superficial, selfish and vain.

The visuals and auditory elements, which evoke a powerful image of 18th-century Versailles, are the movie's forte. And their effects linger in one's mind (or at least they did in mine) long after one's exit from the theater. As a budding art historian, I was stunned by the intensely lush visual spectacle the film has to offer: the pomp and circumstance of ritualized and regimented 18th-century Versailles. The semi-private world that Antoinette builds for herself to escape Versailles's codified, quasi-totalitarian atmosphere, is evoked through a sequence of fast-moving images of champagne-guzzling, beautifully-decorated cake-eating, and Manolo Blahnik shoe buying. Thus Antoinette's fantasy world is likened to a world recognizable to you, me and Carrie Bradshaw. Some people may scoff at this 21st century world transposed to an earlier time. But as the center of the world in 18th-century Europe, Marie-Antoinette's "secret Versailles" would certainly have been as "hip" as this, and Coppola has found effective means through sound and image by which to make this hipness accessible.

The story zooms in on the character of Marie-Antoinette, played by a ravishing Kirsten Dunst, who arrives at Versailles at the tender age of 14, to become queen of France a mere 5 years later. Coppola emphasizes the loneliness of Antoinette throughout the film: most important is her alienation from the French court by the fact that she is a foreigner (something that made her a scapegoat for all of France's problems during the 1780's). Her powerlessness to "fit in" is emphasized also through her sexual alienation from her socially-awkward husband (played by Jason Schwartzmann), her mother's chidings that she has not yet produced an heir to the French throne (and thereby has not secured Austria's political place in Europe), and the bitchy gossip that goes on behind her back at court.

Marie-Antoinette is depicted as an intensely personable, friendly and playful person. Coppola fashions a Marie-Antoinette who is a dutiful daughter, a patient wife to Louis (who eventually overcomes his shyness and becomes a loving and protective husband and father), and a caring and tender mother. She is shown as both bold and humble, two qualities which had quasi-miraculous effects on both the court and the angry mob, as is shown in some of the film's most touching moments.

Equipped with these "essential" personal qualities, the charges traditionally made against Marie-Antoinette fade completely. It is precisely Antoinette's ill-fated attempt at fitting into French court society that causes her escape into a world of idle futility and libertinage. Her escape into the world of "playing shepherdess" in her pleasure-house of Le Hameau is shown not as a silly escape from responsibility but as the simple human need to be surrounded by the natural world.