"Marie Antoinette"

Sofia Coppola's lavish reimagining of a queen getting her teenage kicks -- there's more to it than shopping! -- shines at the New York Film Festival.

By Stephanie Zacharek

Read more: Stephanie Zacharek, Movies, Movie Reviews, Arts & Entertainment, Reviews, New York Film Festival

Photo: Columbia Pictures

Kirsten Dunst in "Marie Antoinette."

Oct. 13, 2006 |

I'm young and I love to be young
I'm free and I love to be free
To live my life the way I want,
To say and do whatever I please.
     -- Lesley Gore, "You Don't Own Me"

Now it's dark and I'm alone
But I won't be afraid
In my room.
     -- Brian Wilson, "In My Room"

No one-time teenager has suffered more from the cruelty of history's gossip mill than Marie Antoinette. When she was told the peasants were starving for lack of bread, the Marie Antoinette of lore shot back, "Let them eat cake!" -- a great line, straight out of "Mean Girls," except that the real Marie Antoinette never said it. Imported to France from her native Austria at age 14, she was the brokered bride of a future king, a bargaining chip with a womb. Her purpose was to cement peace between, and solidify the power of, the two nations. Marie Antoinette landed in a country, and a court, that eyed her with suspicion and contempt: She was a callow, uneducated foreigner, barely worth the disdain of oh-so-civilized France, and the fact that she couldn't immediately produce an heir didn't help. But because she was a future queen, she had access to -- and availed herself of -- the grand and costly buffet of opulence that had been the norm in Versailles long before she arrived. To paraphrase a lyric from another Lesley Gore song: You would shop, too, if it happened to you.

There is shopping in Sofia Coppola's buoyant, passionately sympathetic dream-bio "Marie Antoinette" (which plays the New York Film Festival Friday night, and opens in New York and other cities on Oct. 20). But this is not -- as you might have believed if you trusted the reviews out of Cannes, scrawled by critics from the garretlike confines of their hotel rooms as they clutched their Mao jackets tighter to protect themselves from the threat of beauty, pleasure and decadence -- a movie about shopping. Nor is it a straightforward biopic or a history of the French Revolution (it never purports to be either of those things).

"Marie Antoinette" is Coppola's silk-embroidered fantasy sampler of the inner life of a queen we can never really know: It's a humanist comedy-drama decked out not in sackcloth but in ribbons -- instead of flattering our ideas of our own virtuousness, it asks our sympathy for this doomed queen even as we can't help envying her privilege.

And that, right there, is the challenge of "Marie Antoinette." There's no doubt the woman is a divisive figure, which at least partly explains the mixed-to-negative reaction Coppola's picture received at Cannes. Even with the appearance of biographies like Antonia Fraser's 2001 "Marie Antoinette: The Journey" (which Coppola used as inspiration for the film, and which manages to be both empathetic and keenly judged), there's still a pervasive sense that feeling something for Marie Antoinette means being against the starving masses -- and none of us wants that on our résumé. Writing her off as a bitch is so much neater than considering her as a person, which may be why Coppola opens her picture with a pipe-dream tableau that invites us to shine up those cherished assumptions: We see Coppola's star, Kirsten Dunst, as the frivolous, uninterested queen of legend if not of fact, draped in satin and lounging on a chaise as a lady-in-waiting tends to her toenails. The queen exerts herself only enough to scoop a fingerful of whipped cream from one of the confections laid out before her. She's lost in an erotic stupor, high not just on white sugar but on her own sugar. Against this vision of useless luxury, we hear Gang of Four's "Natural's Not in It," a song that seems to be made up not so much of notes as shards of broken mirror. "Dream of the perfect life/ This heaven gives me migraine": Too much sugar, too much self -- either one will do you in.

That opening is a tease, a sly visual joke with some truth in it, but it's not the whole of the truth. And from there, "Marie Antoinette" takes off at a sidesaddle gallop. This is Coppola's third movie, her most ambitious in terms of structure and lavish detail, although it skims themes she's explored before. Her adaptation of Jeffrey Eugenides' "The Virgin Suicides" is like a Pre-Raphaelite painter's vision of '70s suburbia: Telling the story of the mysterious Lisbon sisters and the neighborhood boys who adore them, Coppola maps, with tenderness and clarity, the incongruity between the dreamy mantle of idealization the boys drape around the young women, and the isolation and depression those women suffer in secret. And in the elegiac "Lost in Translation," a young woman rattles about in a marriage that she's unwilling to identify as unhappy: Marriage is supposed to confer a sense of belonging, and yet she belongs nowhere.

"Marie Antoinette" is an expansion on the idea of "belonging nowhere," a blending of imagination and history that may fit less comfortably in the genre of costume pictures than in that of teenage drama -- a genre that was born with "Rebel Without a Cause" and took root in the culture with movies like "Splendor in the Grass" and, much later, "Fast Times at Ridgemont High." More recently, the genre has thrived on television in shows like "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," "Veronica Mars" and "The O.C." -- shows that are watched as much by adults who lived through teenage insecurity but will never be able to shake its phantom as they are by actual teenagers.

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