Marie Antoinette

It’s difficult to define the strengths of Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette. Coppola creates such beautiful mood pieces that words often fail to properly describe the experience of watching them. What one must know about this movie before viewing it is simply that it is not a historical biopic of any kind. It is a spirited and romanticized character portrait aimed at capturing the exuberance, the loneliness, and the destructiveness of reckless youth. Even though it’s an entirely 18th century story, it almost feels as if Coppola is in some ways channeling her own nostalgic memories of a miserable and wonderful moment of young freedom in her life and theorizing what that would be like if at 18 you happened to also be the queen of France.

Sofia Coppola has become the foremost auteur of female isolation films. Her movies focus on young women who find themselves misunderstood by society and trapped by their inability to satisfyingly communicate with the people around them. In Marie Antoinette, Coppola envisions the tale of the infamous French queen as a fish out of water tragicomedy in which the very beautiful and very young Marie Antoinette (Kirsten Dunst) is exploited for the sake of national interests and married off to the future king of France (Jason Schwartzman).

Though this is a stylistically lavish and almost surreal comedy about the French court, it’s also an emotionally subtle and highly understated drama about very repressed characters. Dunst has never been better than she is here. She exposes the wild glee and the quiet remorse of Marie Antoinette with very minimal amounts of expressive dialogue. You can feel the life in her eyes fade away as she’s ensnared by French protocol and transformed into a reluctant ruler. Schwartzman is also quite good as the charmingly pathetic Louis XVI and does equally beautiful things with small glances or the subtle clasping of his young wife’s hand.

Coppola also doesn’t brilliant work here as a director, making what would otherwise be a stodgy costume drama into a liberated and relatable story of young rebellion on a grand scale. She guides Marie through innocence in to decadence and eventually on to maturity. It’s a brilliant journey of style and character and Coppola never fails to make every moment flourish with color and life akin to the fiery spirit of her muse. The film looks and feels as Marie does. It begins simple, descends into decadence, emerges with natural warmth and in the end finds itself destroyed. Those who feel that Coppola’s style is meant to mask some sort of shallowness need only to look at the final shot of the film to be corrected. Here Coppola subtly suggests the entire French revolution with one very simple image. Her style here is not a mask. It’s an examination of superficiality in the life of Marie and an exploration of her life through visual aesthetics.

Grade: A+