Marie Antoinette Reviews

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Post by Sonic Youth »

There were indications of conflict, but they were never allowed to flourish into true drama. Which is fine, if subtlety is your strong suit.

Magilla, I think the DuBarry character worked because it was the only time the movie had a true visual counterpoint to a very homogenous-looking film. I read the complaints about MA winning Best Costume, claiming that it was historically accurate and very pretty but did not bring out any nuances to the characters. Argento's dark rancourousness provided a vibe that the rest of the film lacked, both in her manner and her appearence.
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Post by Big Magilla »

Sure there was conflict, but it was portrayed more as sulking than heartbreak IMO. I give the film props for its art direction, set desgin and costumes and I really don't have a problem with the music, but it's way too tame and I hard time distinguishing all those nondescript actresses in pretty gowns from one another. I'd rather get my French revolution fix from A Tale of Two Cities or even Shearer's Marie Antoinette.
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Post by Penelope »

I thought there was a great deal of conflict in Marie Antoinette: between Marie and the French nobles; between Marie and Louis; and, ultimately, inside Marie herself.
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Post by Big Magilla »

Sonic, I agree with just about about everything you said except perhaps the casting of Asia Argento as Madame DuBarry. It's not that she isn't good, it's just that, like everything else, the character is too tentatively written. There's little menace, little tension to the conflict between her and Antoinette. In the end, she basically just pouts as she is cast aside.

A pretty movie, but one that could have used a little of Papa Dario's blood and guts, especially at the end where unless you know the outcome could be read as "and they lived happily ever after in the Austrian Alps or wherever they ran off to." Marie Antoinette in The Court of Versailles reimagined as The Sound of Music with 80s rock tunes instead of Rodgers & Hammerstein.
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Post by Sonic Youth »

Those reports of boos at Cannes would suggest Marie Antoinette was a disaster at 'The Brown Bunny' levels. Not hardly. Those raves by the French critics and some American critics indicates that it could be a misunderstood masterpiece. It wishes. This stimuli-overload lacking in incident is a gorgeous time-waster, spending two hours doing what thirty minutes could have done more effectively. I remember when that teaser trailer came out last year, which showed scenes of the French court in Versailles set to a New Order song on the soundtrack. That was a hip deceit, because if you muted the trailer you'd see how ordinary the movie really looked. Well, the 80s rock is interspersed throughout the movie, but since it doesn't engage in any other blatant anachronisms, it was a pointless endeavor. If you're gonna play that game, then go all the way with it! A few anachronisms are subtler, such as casting Asia Agento as Madame DuBarry, and she's the best thing about the film, providing a truly rancorous contrast to the rest of the court, and indeed the rest of the film.

Coppola is operating under the less-is-more principle, maintaining that the things that are left unsaid and unshown are all the more powerful for it, with the camera acting as an outside observer rather than an active participant. "Pure cinema" as it were, with dialogue only a secondary or a non-characteristic of the narrative. Very Terence Malick, very Gus Van Sant. Only, not as good. I remember when this movie was (sight unseen) the centerpiece of Oscar Watch's essence, with all the fanboys calling critics stupid for daring to question - daring to NOT UNDERSTAND - what Coppola was aiming for. Sure, it's all about a pampered princess living in the bubble of Marsailles, almost entirely cut off from the turmoil of the outside world, until it's too late. But the critics made it sound like it was a BAD thing. Look, here's the thing. As Ryan Gosling says in Half Nelson, history is conflict. And conflict is the essence of good, powerful drama. And Copolla isn't a commanding enough filmmaker to compensate for her intentional lack of drama. I did sense some gentle, satirical jabs of the social rituals the French court engaged in, but what does that have to do with me? I'll watch Stephen Frears The Queen, instead.
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Post by Sabin »

I fully expect Lance Acord's cinematography to receive at least two prominent critic group's awards before being promptly snubbed for nomination by the Academy. To sit and watch 'Marie Antoinette' is so rich and fulfilling, and yet the whole experience becomes tedious. Intellectually, I understand and approve of what Coppola is doing with her milieu and the valley girl accent, but I don't really feel it deepening as it goes along...which, I think, is the point. What really is she to do in the Court? So, while none of Coppola's choices are objectionable and the result is an opulent marvel, the thing goes on - it's a very long 123 mins where 100 would have sufficed, I feel. I wanted to be on board, but I was more than ready to be out of the pool by the end.
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Post by Damien »

Sonic Youth wrote:And Bow Wow Wow's "I Want Candy" is a great song.
Do you know The Strangeloves' original version (from, if I remember correctly, 1965)? Even greater than Bow Wow Wow.
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Post by Sonic Youth »

Could you forward my message to her? Thanks! :p
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Post by 99-1100896887 »

Katherine Monk's review says it, Sonic Youth.Not just old me.
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Post by Sonic Youth »

cam wrote:I am not going to spend money to see this, which is exactly the way that I felt about Moulin Rouge, with its rehash of "pop hits", with the over-hyped Nicole Kidman. Some of you who are younger and hipper than I am may be able to tell me why the decisions were made to have the actors expensively clad in period costumes, speak in accents unheard of in France at the time, or have a soundtrack of pap from someone named Bow Wow Wow from the 80's.

Were he alive, maybe Joseph Papp could explain post-modernism and textual re-interpretation to you. I believe this younger, hipper director would have been 85 years old today.

Is it any less ridiculous to hear Norma Shearer portraying the Viennese expatriate Queen of France with a British accent? While set to a Herbert Stothart orchestral score that couldn't possibly have been composed for at least another hundred years?

And Bow Wow Wow's "I Want Candy" is a great song.
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Post by abcinyvr »

Marie Antoinette

Katherine Monk, CanWest News Service
Published: Friday, October 20, 2006
Rating 3 stars out of 4

Sofia Coppola knows how much can get lost in translation, which raises some central questions about her execution of Marie Antoinette -- the film, not the character.
Truth be told, Coppola refrains from even showing the famed French queen's final moments and the grisly separation between head and corporeal frame.
She hints at her fate all the way along, constantly picturing her head -- and nothing else of her body -- looking wistfully from windows.
But Marie Antoinette's death is the second most famous thing about her. The most famous, of course, is her precious line to the angry mob gathered outside Versailles. They chanted for bread. She, the legend goes, replied:
"Let them eat cake!"
Though the line has since been attributed to philosopher and political thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau, close to a decade before Marie Antoinette even reached Versailles, the phrase stuck to the ill-fated queen throughout history.
Moreover, the actual phrase, when uttered in French, isn't as bad as it sounds. "Qu'ils mangent de la brioche!" -- the exact phrase written by Rousseau, supposedly quoting a noted queen (but definitely not Marie Antoinette) -- really means let them eat the other, egg-based bread.
To a 21st-century viewer, the fine difference between brioche and cake may not seem all that great, but 250 years of history has clearly changed the context.
In 1770s France, bread and its pricier cousin brioche were both baked in large quantities -- but sometimes, bakers skimped on baking bread to upsell customers on brioche. A cry to let them eat brioche could just as easily be seen as a populist nod to "fight the power."
The historical exactness of the line -- and how the true meaning may have been lost in translation -- doesn't really matter. What matters is how despised Marie Antoinette was during her day, and why.
Lambasted for centuries as a weak, capricious and vain woman who was cruel to her subjects and completely self-absorbed, Marie Antoinette became the latter-day Eve -- a symbol of all female evils -- and it's this impression that Coppola goes out of her way to deconstruct and revise.
Basing a large chunk of the information on a recent biography by noted historian Antonia Fraser, Coppola attempts to humanize Marie Antoinette, with somewhat limited results.
Her first victory is the casting choice of Kirsten Dunst to play the doomed monarch. Dunst is believably Austrian, and she has a timeless face -- lacking surgically altered features -- that makes her believable as the 14-year-old bride to Louis XVI.
Dunst is also highly likable, especially when the first shots of her feature a cute pug puppy in her arms.
Though we're already on board the love train from the opening shots, Coppola pushes us to like Marie Antoinette by making her the fish out of water -- and the victim of the court's most hideous gossips.
For a while, the movie feels like a modern high school dramedy: Mean Girls in period dress.
Oddly enough, it seems that's exactly where Coppola wanted to go. The minute Marie Antoinette claps out loud in the theatre -- a real no-no of the era -- Coppola seems to let go of the tight period reins and launches us into a modernized, alt-rock landscape.
Borrowing devices from modern-day Cinderella stories, we watch as Marie Antoinette and her favourite ladies-in-waiting try on new dresses and countless new shoes -- all, by the way, styled for the movie by none other than Manolo Blahnik.
At one point, the viewer may even notice Coppola's obvious anachronism of a pair of Chuck Taylor All Stars crammed into the back of the frame.
The director is playing with us, she's playing with history, and she's playing with the contrivances of the film medium.
Yet, while there's nothing wrong with the pop-music soundtrack -- gleaned, inexplicably, from '80s-era alt-rock (Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Cure, Malcolm McLaren) -- it doesn't add much to the movie either.
You can't expect to pull in the kids with a soundtrack that appeals to their parents. Moreover, you can't expect to pull in the older demographic by constantly breaking the rules, and pulling up the veil of the era with dated music.
The disconnect is huge, and to be honest, somewhat irritating when you consider how much genuine texture she pushed into the frame as a result of her all-access pass to Versailles.
Coppola makes fantastic use of every real locale, and the cinematography is dazzling. But she's no Baz Luhrmann (Moulin Rouge, Romeo & Juliet), and fails to find any new emotional wrinkles by blending genres and eras.
Perhaps her greatest failure is the revisioning of Marie Antoinette herself.
While royalists defended her great courage in prison, and described her as a devoted mother and doting wife, Coppola spends much of her time portraying her as a shallow and selfish young woman absorbed by shopping -- practically emptying the monarchy's coffers by herself.
Apparently, Marie Antoinette's strongest years were in the months leading up to her capture -- when she helped her husband navigate foreign policy -- and during her time in prison, when she discovered within herself an inner strength and emotional maturity.
She may have been a weak and capricious brat at one point in her life, but she changed. Coppola fails to show us that change, and as a result, she fails to find the depth of character required to reinvent historical figures as real people.
© The Vancouver Sun 2006
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Post by flipp525 »

cam wrote:I am not going to spend money to see this, which is exactly the way that I felt about Moulin Rouge, with its rehash of "pop hits", with the over-hyped Nicole Kidman.

You're not going to pay to see it, yet you're going to write three consecutive posts about it? Riiiight. Okay.
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Post by 99-1100896887 »

abcinyvr wrote:I thought the inclusion of the 80's 'post-punk' music was perfect. Hearing Hong Kong Garden and All Cats Are Grey full blast in a theatre was worth the price of admission alone. M.A. and L.XVI were teenagers after all so not making the score appropriate to the period helps to point this out.

[/quote]

Oh? It's because they were teenagers that Coppola chose this music. Thanks for enlightening me.

From today's Vancouver Sun:

"Associated Press: Why did you include the modern music?
Coppola: I wanted to make an impressionistic portrait. I didn't want to make a historical epic. So it was how to do a period film in my own style, not the genre of period films.I always wanted to tell the story from her ppoint of view. Part of that was making impressions of what it would feel like to be there at that time. The music had the emotional quality I wanted the scenes to have, mixing 18th-century and contemporary and taking artistic licence to create it in my own way."

If you can follow this reasoning you're a better man than I am.
I think that the answer to the AP question is "Because I wanted to, and I like the songs."

Don't give this girl any more money to make films.
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Post by 99-1100896887 »

abcinyvr wrote:I thought the inclusion of the 80's 'post-punk' music was perfect. Hearing Hong Kong Garden and All Cats Are Grey full blast in a theatre was worth the price of admission alone. M.A. and L.XVI were teenagers after all so not making the score appropriate to the period helps to point this out.

[/quote]

Oh? It's because they were teenagers that Coppola chose this music. Thanks for enlightning me.

From today's Vancouver Sun:

"Associated Press: Why did you include the modern music?
Coppola: I wanted to make an impressionistic portrait. I didn't want to make a historical epic. So it was how to do a period film in my own style, not the genre of period films.I always wanted to tell the story from her ppoint of view. Part of that was making impressions of what it would feel like to be there at that time. The music had the emotional quality I wanted the scenes to have, mixing 18th-century and contempoary and taking artistic licence to creat it in my own way."

If you can follow this reasoning you're a better man than I am.
I think that the answerf to the AP question is "Because I wanted to, and I like the songs."

Don't give this girl any more money to make films.
99-1100896887

Post by 99-1100896887 »

I am not going to spend money to see this, which is exactly the way that I felt about Moulin Rouge, with its rehash of "pop hits", with the over-hyped Nicole Kidman. Some of you who are younger and hipper than I am may be able to tell me why the decisions were made to have the actors expensively clad in period costumes, speak in accents unheard of in France at the time, or have a soundtrack of pap from someone named Bow Wow Wow from the 80's. Makes you wonder what the producers were smoking when they agreed to this expense starring non-entities like Dunst and Schwartzman, and Molly Shannon, for God's Sakes.
Say goodbye to this one.
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