Kirsten Dunst, Jason Schwarzman, Judy Davis, Rip Torn, Steve Coogan. Dir. Sophia Coppola, Columbia, 2006
It always feels good to say, in the first couple minutes of a movie, "Hmmm, THIS is interesting." It feels good again when, at about ten minutes, I say, "Well now, what have we here..." If, after 20-30 minutes, my brain's lit up and I keep saying, "Oh my god...Oh look at what they're doing here...Jesus this is fucking brilliant..." as the ideas the filmmaker wants to explore start going off in my head like fireworks, as I start thinking about symbolism and metaphor and how useless "historical accuracy" is within a great narrative, that feels even better.
When, however, a music cue comes up and I only realize I've stopped thinking and let the music and the lighting and cinematography and costuming and the performances merge into a seamless whole as I start to move in my chair and sing along and laugh out loud as my hands wave in the air ('cuz I just don't care) as the music, the movie and I become one for even a few moments THAT IS THE BEST FEELING IN THE WORLD. THAT IS WHY I SEE MOVIES. THAT IS WHY I LIVE.
That moment arrives in Sofia Coppola's glorious Marie Antoinette when New Order's "Ceremony" fades up, as Marie and her husband, King Louis XVI and their closest friends romp through the gardens of Versailles, staying up after partying all night to watch the sunrise. It doesn't look like clueless, evil monarchs partying while Paris burns, it looks like two couples in love with youth and freedom and each other, like four kids loosed on the town after their senior prom, savoring an ephemeral moment with all the passion and joy at their command.
It looks like that because it is. Marie Antoinette has as much to do with the actual historical figure as Camelot has to do with the real King Arthur. Marie Antoinette uses the final, notorious Queen of France's life as a lens to focus on what life is like for contemporary young women and for what it's like to be an 18 year-old daughter of "Hollywood royalty" villefied for killing a beloved movie franchise and studio. Marie Antoinette is a deeply personal film by a woman who lived to tell the tale and a keen study of what life is for young women today.
Maria Antonia, the Archduchess of Austria, youngest daughter of Empress Maria-Theresa, entered into an arranged marriage with the future Louis XVI, Louis-Auguste, at 14, to seal a political alliance between France and Austria. In order to become properly French, all outward sign of her nationality, including her pet pug, were stripped from her. Arriving at Versailles, she and Louis-Auguste were married at once then prodded into bed to produce a royal heir.
Every frame of the film's first third landed like blows. This is what it's like to be a woman, the film practically screamed at me. This is what it's like to be valued as a tool, as an object of desire, as a broodmare. This is what it's like to be valued for everything but the person you are, the person you have yet to become, the inner person no one else sees. Because they don't look. Because they don't care. Because no one expects them to care.
Marie and her husband are teenagers when they meet. At 14, the procreative aspirations of two rival empires rest on two people who have yet to grow up, who would as soon play and pursue their own hobbies as pursue carnal passion. Indeed, Louis-Auguste prefers hunting and the study of locks and keys to even talking to Marie. Marie would rather attend the opera and learn to sing. Their urge to discover themselves flies in the face of national considerations, but Marie, the woman, the girl, is blamed for Louis-Auguste's failures in the royal bed.
Marie becomes another kind of object, a scapegoat. Her mother writes her with new strategies of seduction. Courtiers gossip in her presence, speculating on her failure to seduce her husband, when in fact it's Louis' disinterest and discomfort with his role which delay conception. The woman bears the brunt of societal expectation, not the man. She's too foreign, too rebellious, too wayward, interested in parties and spending time with her friends. She is a teenager in a world with no use for such a thing.
When Louis finally consummates the marriage and Marie produces first a daughter, then the sought-after son, the couple move from adolescence to young adulthood, in love with each other at last. Life, the thing that happens while you're busy making plans, happens to them when King Louis XV dies of smallpox and Louis-Auguste and Marie are elevated to the throne.
"God help us, we are too young to reign," Louis XVI prays at the moment of his succession. They are, and youthful inexperience and impulsivity ultimately lead to their demise, yet much of the excess attending their reign looks much like two kids behaving as they were raised. If they seem thoughtless or heedless, they never appear cruel. Just clueless.
Coppola uses most of Marie and Louis-Auguste's reign to draw the parallel between the way French society demonized her spending and gambling and what happened in her own life. Cast at the literal 11th hour as Mary Corleone in Godfather Part III after Winona Ryder dropped out one day before principal photography began, Tina Brown's Vanity Fair magazine singled out Sofia as the sole cause of the film's narrative and financial failure. When Paramount Studios accepted a buyout from Sumner Redstone's Viacom a year later, Godfather III's failure to restore the company to profitability took most of the blame, renewing criticism not of Francis for his failings but of Sofia. Sofia Coppola spent the '90s as the goat for disappointed fans, angry shareholders, and a generation of Boomer feminists more interested in attacking GenX girls than bringing them inside the tent.
In hindsight, the level of responsibility assigned an 18 year-old girl for a film and its studio's failure looks like misogyny, regardless of Tina Brown's gender. It looks like the kind of double standards society always applies to women. Francis Ford Coppola's failure to line up a suitable alternate for Ryder wasn't the problem. Paramount's refusal to trust Francis's vision of the film as Godfather Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone, wasn't the problem. Casting George Hamilton as a replacement for Robert Duvall wasn't the problem. The only problem could only be found in an 18 year-old girl with no acting experience thrust into a linchpin role. Quite apart from misogynist, scapegoating Sofia Coppola now looks, and is, absurd.
Coppola draws the parallel most clearly with the infamous quote, "Let them eat cake." Attributed to Marie after the French Revolution, and first mentioned in print as the words of an unnamed princess when Maria Antonia was nine and still living in Austria, there is no historical evidence Marie Antoinette ever said or believed it, just as there is no historical evidence that Sofia Coppola destroyed both the Godfather franchise and Paramount.
History, unfortunately, is written by the winners, so Marie Antoinette is forever seen as the ruin of France, not Louis's overspending to back the American colonies in the Revolutionary War, and Sofia Coppola is still singled out as the fatal flaw in an inherently flawed film rather than her father's midlife crisis or Paramount's refusal to trust his instincts or Paramount's CEO's disinterest in understanding the first two films.
Accuracy has become the weapon of choice when critiquing historical films. Failed films refused to heed it. Hit films failed to heed according to those who hate its success. I've seen people blast historical accuracy as a rationalization for unflattering portraits, for the exclusion of women and people of color, and praised for increasing a picture's authenticity. My own feeling is that historical accuracy is irrelevant unless the film is a documentary.
Marie Antoinette is not a documentary. Nor is it a biopic. It's a narrative. A story. A point of view. The real-life Marie Antoinette may well have gambled and spent money on dresses and lavish parties at a time when her people were starving, but Marie Antoinette isn't a history of the French Revolution or of France. It's a film concerned with the ludicrous and unrealistic pressures applied to women idealized and placed on pedestals but never seen as themselves. Roger Ebert called Sofia Coppola one of our great chroniclers of female loneliness and he was right, but I think she and Marie Antoinette encompass much more.
Whatever Marie wants is held subordinate to the exigencies of statecraft and societal expectation. She wants to keep her dog, but the dog is Austrian and symbolism matters more than the love of a 14 year-old girl for her pet. She wants to please her husband, and to experience romantic love, but her husband isn't interested in her desires. She wants to nurse her own babies, but propriety and superstition about her "weakened state" take precedence. She wants to be young and carefree and experience life, but French society needs a scapegoat for centuries of mismanagement.
To me, it all looked like what we do to women, particularly young women, in the 21st century. We talk about feminism and liberation but we still expect women to be primary caregiver for their children and husband. We urge women to work but deny them paid family leave or financial assistance with daycare. We men love women who act slutty, until the women don't want us, and then we call them promiscuous whores. We put women on pedestals then knock them off when our necks cramp from looking up at them. Almost every frame of Marie Antoinette drives these points home through the story of a young woman who could only be herself when convenient to men.
For all that, Marie Antoinette avoids the ponderous obviousness of straight allegory or feminist polemic. It's a lush, lavish production, deliberately lit and photographed to resemble Kubrick's Barry Lyndon. It's a movie full of beauty and joy, a movie as contradictory as adolescence, itself. The anachronistic music cues draw the parallel between then and now so clearly you'd have to be an asshole not to see it. It is a movie as much about the ecstatic communion of film at its best as anything else.
Full transparency. I'm biased when it comes to the music. Sofia Coppola is four years my junior. She and I grew up with the same love of punk and post-punk and New Wave. The karaoke scene in Lost in Translation sounded like a mini-tour of my own record collection. In my senior year of high school, my favorite album was New Order's Low-life. My second and third-favorites were New Order's Power, Corruption & Lies and Movement, their preceding two records. I spent the summer between junior and senior year obsessively rewinding and replaying Adam & the Ants' "Kings of the Wild Frontier," the summer of 1991 doing the same with Siouxsie & the Banshees' Peek-a-Boo.
When "Ceremony" started playing, I screamed out loud like a clubkid charging the dancefloor. Everything I wrote at the start is true, but Coppola gets extra love from me simply by dint of her record collection. She uses the songs and images ecstatically, but I'd give a lesser filmmaker at least some credit for using New Order.
I have deliberately eschewed plot-synopsis as much as possible in this writeup. The story, based on Antonia Fraser's biography of Marie Antoinette, is strong but, as I've said, hardly the point. Or, at least, my takeaway. Marie Antoinette is a film to be experienced on its terms and no one else's. If viewers can surrender that completely, I think they will understand why I now consider Marie Antoinette one of my top ten films of the Aughts and one of the best I've ever seen. If they can't, they will miss the kind of ecstatic, transcendant experience we get all too seldom from Hollywood. That would be as tragic as the real Marie's life.
I cannot recommend Marie Antoinette strongly enough. See this movie. See This Movie. SEE THIS MOVIE.
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