Marie Antoinette Cast:
Kirsten

B +
Dunst, Jason Schwartzman, Rip Torn, Judy Davis, Asia Argento, Marianne Faithfull

Director:
Sofia Coppola

Rating: PG-13
for sexual content, partial nudity, innuendo

Running time:
123 minutes Some dismissive reviewer is likely to describe Sofia Coppola's lemon and cream Marie Antoinette as a feature-length music video. What's wrong with that, I'd like to know?
   If anything, the film needs more New Romantic (postpunk '80s Britpop) on the soundtrack to shake up the languorous, almost Barry Lyndon-like cinematography and pacing; every moment works toward transmitting, drop by luxurious drop, the honeyed ennui of court life at 18th-century Versailles.
   The film's signature scene, one that's likely to be howled at by critics, is a pastel-colored montage of the notyet-queen and her ladies in waiting indulging in conspicuous consumption of desserts and the 18th-century equivalent of Jimmy Choos to the Bo Diddley beat of Bow Wow Wow's "I Want Candy." It's blatant and cheesy and wonderful all at once. Where I come from, you have to love a movie that finds resonance between Gang of Four's "Natural's Not In It" and a Habsburg offering to La France.
   It is both the greatest strength and a major weakness of Marie Antoinette that every moment seems as self-contained as a pop song. In the end, what we get is a kind of cinematic concept album in which some of the "songs" aren't up to the standards of the best.
   But the best moments are fantastic; we're immersed in a funhouse where French accents, much less actual French, are rarely attempted, but the other qualities of the time are faithfully rendered. At times, the film takes on the voluptuousness of one of Zhang Yimou's Chinese epics, evoking in nearly tactile sensation the rasp of silk against milky skin or the restraining firmness of ladies undergarments. Coppola means to show us about the period, rather than tell us, and she also means for us to deeply empathize with this teen queen, a blond slip of a girl caught up by forces she never had cause to bother her silly head about. And so we share the splendid isolation of the profligate Marie and hear and see almost nothing of the struggles of her people.
   But there's more to the movie than this "Girls Just Want to Have Fun" premise. One guesses that Coppola gets a lot of the historical particulars right and Kirsten Dunst, as Marie, supplies the right blend of up-to-the-minute hipness and period decorum.
   Marie is taxed not only with being the Queen of France, she also must do what she can to look out for the interests of her native Austria, all attachments to which she symbolically (but not actually) shed when she crossed the border. Like most royals, Marie is more than a little spoiled, and she naturally rebels against the strict protocol of the court -- when she's not using it as a cudgel against King Louis XV's mistress, notorious Madame du Barry (Asia Argento).
   Her husband, famously inept Louis XVI (Jason Schwartzman, carrying a De Niro-esque extra 40 pounds), is a toad who prefers stalking stags and stable boys to the connubial comforts of the royal bed chamber (which might be a relief if much did not depend on Marie's producing an heir to the throne).
   While Dunst's performance probably shouldn't be (and probably won't be by anyone other than this reviewer) mentioned in the same breath of Forest Whitaker's awesome portrayal of Idi Amin as empathetic beast, she does suggest a giggly girlish innocence. But does boredom excuse -- or even explain -- the revolution-inciting excess of the Bourbon court? I don't know, but I believe history can be understood as the consequences of human impulses. What if Hitler had been a better painter? Would he still have felt the need to engage in murderous performance art?
   It's hardly surprising that a daughter of privilege like Sofia Coppola sees Marie Antoinette more as a misunderstood young woman than an icon of aristocratic arrogance and insulation. Thus, the film is less a social treatise or apology than an evanescent pleasure cruise, a light pink dream of a movie that transports but doesn't require you to think very deeply (or even to keep the various bewigged characters straight in your head). It has some nice performances from Rip Torn, whose randy Louis XV seems to have wandered in off the set of The Larry Sanders Show, and British comedic touchstone Steve Coogan who, to our mild dismay, never breaks into the sort of offhand, direct-to-the-audience expository observation he supplies in Tristam Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story (2005).
   While the film teeters a little in the third act when Coppola seems to fish around for the "meaning" of Marie, which ironically results in trivializing her, this is a full-dress costume extravaganza better experienced without a prescreening brush up on the "real" Marie Antoinette, whether or not she actually uttered the Paris Hiltonism "Let them eat cake." This is a story of another bored, mad housewife -- albeit one who doesn't have to actually reach for anything. And you can dance to it.

This story was published Friday, October 20, 2006