Marie Antoinette Reviews

[abcinyvr]

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.

I don't know if Coppola's style really suits a broad story such as this. Her characterizations are very intimate, but I suppose, in a way, telling the story of a Queen who lives in a bubble shielded from everything outside the court is right for Sophia.

Anyone expecting the standard suptuous dramatic costume flick is going to be disappointed - and I must say that this is the first movie in a long time (since Magnolia perhaps) where there were people walking out. It is a good film, but watching The Virgin Suicides later in the day, as I did, it doesn't compare.

[FilmFan720]

I'll put my two cents in and say that I think this is the best film I've seen yet this year (although I haven't seen much). I found the film a blast, and Dunst's performance fantastic. While by no means a history lesson, I think that is what Coppola was trying to avoid at all costs. The film is not about Marie Antoinette the historical figure, and political creature (which the movie points out she was not), but Marie Antoinette the figure and the human being. In doing this, it is itself deconstructing the historical biopic, which is more often than not interested in looking at a historical figure than a real person.

That being said, I loved the pop score, the sneakers, the accent-less performances, the anachronisms, the costumes, the lovely shots of Versailles (I've been there, and don't remember it being as lovely as this film makes it...maybe they should pipe in The Cure and Bow Wow Wow during palace tours), everything that critics don't seem to approve of. While it is not your mother's biopic, it is not going for historical accuracy as much as emotional accuracy. For me, Coppola nailed it perfectly.

Tripp

[Mack Ten]

I can see why people might hate this...

But I loved it.

It is mystifying to me that people are complaining about the accents, though. I mean, should they be speaking in French accented English just because they are playing French? That wouldn't make any sense, so why not just have them speak in their normal voices????

[Penelope]

But, see, that was the point.

[The Original BJ]

Well, I haven't read much lately about Louis XVI, so you may be right.

However, I certainly didn't envision him with an American accent. I know we've come to accept the stereotype of British accents in lieu of French ones, so I hate to get picky like this . . . but in my book, if you're wearing those frilly costumes and powdered wigs, you better not sound like you're from California.

[Penelope]

Having read a great deal about Louis XVI, Jason Schwartzman's portrayal was precisely how I evisioned him! I thought it was a spot-on perfect performance.

[The Original BJ]

Ugh. I didn't like it. I thought it was dull, ramblingly plotless, shallow, and full of too many WTF? questions for me.

For example . . .

WTF are Kirsten Dunst and Jason Schwartzman speaking in American accents? Really, could they have at least TRIED to pull off something that sounded remotely European? And Valley Girl is EXACTLY the word I would use to describe Kirsten Dunst, and in this case, this is a very bad thing.

WTF is with the '80s music? I don't care that it's not historically accurate. But I do care that a montage of Kirsten trying on new clothes and saying things like, "It looks like candy" is set to . . . wait for it . . . "I Wan't Candy." Hm, clever.

WTF is with Molly Shannon? Talk about someone who should NOT be in a period movie. EVER.

WTF is with Jason Schwartzman? See above.

WTF is with grotesquely over-the-top gay costumer? Tone it down, Sofia. TONE IT DOWN.

I'm glad the film avoids the stuffy pretension of so many period flicks. But for what? Bland comedy awkwardly playing dress-up? For me, the film wasn't stylized ENOUGH a la Moulin Rouge to justify its anachronisms, however intentional they may be. Everything in this movie just feels so out of sync with itself.

All of that said, the costumes are pretty dazzling.

[Penelope]

You know what? ***1/2, I loved it! And I couldn't stand Lost in Translation, but Marie Antoinette was engaging, funny, smart, delightfully off-kilter, and, really, the best kind of movie because I left wanting more (true, that was partly because I missed the politics and the post-Bastille details, but I still immensely liked what Sofia did here). Kirsten Dunst, who has been very good (The Cat's Meow) and very, very bad (she's consistently the weak link in the Spider-Man films), is wonderful here, though she's admittedly playing Marie as an entitled Valley Girl--nevertheless, she seems freer, more at ease before the camera than I've seen her in a long, long time.

I can understand why some would hate it, but I found it a daring, original interpretation of history, and she pulled it off. (And it would be a shame if the negative reviews prevent it from scoring a nomination for the dazzling costumes....)

[dws1982]

It finally went Rotten. 53% overall and 50% Cream of the Crop.

[Sonic Youth]

In four days, Marie Antoinette has taken a twenty point drop! It's now down to 61% (barely) fresh.

There's a lesson to be learned, both here and with Flags of Our Fathers. Following the critical development on a three-times-a-day basis via internet can be very misleading.

Oscar Watch has a large group of Marie Antoinette Scientologists calling every critic who hates the film stupid, and insisting the bad reception at Cannes was a lie. I haven't visited since Marie was at 81% and they were predicting it would go to the 90s. I'm scared to see what's going on over there.

[Akash]

I like Sofia Coppola's work thus far and was therefore reasonably excited about this film until early world of mouth made it seem like a missfire. However, a recommendation from the guys at Slant is enough for me to go see it with rejevenated reasonable expectations. Slant is way more reliable than most of the middling stuff that masquerades as film criticism. I mean I'm sorry Roger Ebert has had health problems but I can't say I'm anxious to have him start writing again. But I digress. I plan to see the film this weekend and Slant has given me some hope that Coppola will deliver again.

Or maybe I just really like that Strokes song.

[anonymous1980]

Ed "The Apostle" Gonzalez gives it ***1/2

Marie Antoinette
Cast: Kirsten Dunst, Jason Schwartzman, Judy Davis, Rip Torn, Rose Byrne, Asia Argento, Molly Shannon, Shirley Henderson, Danny Huston, Steve Coogan, Aurore Clément, Jamie Dornan, Marianne Faithfull, Guillaume Gallienne and Mary Nighy
Directed by: Sofia Coppola
Screenplay by: Sofia Coppola
Distributor: Columbia Pictures
Runtime: 123 min
Rating: PG-13
Year: 2006


All eyes will be on you." It is a warning Marie Antoinette's mind does not fathom because she is, after all, only a child when she is forced to leave friends, a cute little pug, and all of Austria behind to enter the court of Louis the XV. Greeted outside the gates of the royal palace in Versailles by the Comtesse de Noailles (Judy Davis), Marie Antoinette (Kirsten Dunst) hugs the woman, whose mortification is most visible in her severe neckline. This young girl will need molding, and implicit in her cold reception is the difficultly of her pilgrim's progress toward queenhood—a tragic funeral procession into a gilded confine where Marie Antoinette will be fashioned into something she is decidedly not and where her every movement will be so closely monitored that the clothes on her back will become not unlike mood rings, absorbing and representing the colors of the demoiselle's traumatized essence. The last shot of the film is telling: A beautiful, bejeweled bird, this girl will be ripped out of her cage, leaving only feathers and loads of crap behind.

Does empathy explain why Sofia Coppola took the story of Marie Antoinette as the follow-up to her greatly successful Lost in Translation? No other royal in history was so brutally and unforgivably held up for scrutiny, and no other female filmmaker has had her talent, privilege, and success so insensitively begrudged by critics, male and female alike. (Some are going so far as to contemplate a conspiracy in the latest issue of Film Comment, which features Dunst dolled up on the cover and an advertisement for Francis Ford Coppola's Diamond Collection wine on the back.) The prissy disdain for the vintage of Coppola's films in some circles could be described as an act of sexual terrorism—the kind that has conveniently spared Wes Anderson, another maker of eccentrically hermetic cine-artifacts—but Marie Antoinette is scarcely defensive, which is not to say that it is without meaning or that its commentary on its titular queen's rise and fall is not barbed.

I plead guilty to holding Coppola's soundtrack against Marie Antoinette, sight unseen, but now I have seen the light and it is as lucid as the rising sun Marie Antoinette takes in after a long birthday celebration, on a dawn that is noisy with the sound of friendly chatter and the clink of champagne glasses. Coppola's collection of mostly new wave and post-punk anthems, like the thoroughly modern performances she does not have to coax very hard out of her actors (only Marie Antoinette's young daughter speaks French in the film), serve as the director's great, often funny distancing effects—attempts to critically chart and define the space between us and the past but also to bring us closer to the truth. Smart and playful, the songs of Marie Antoinette illuminate the intricacies of a discouraged young woman's state of mind and being, from the horror of her initiation into a foreign world ("Jynweythek Ylow") to her thirst for material possessions ("I Want Candy").

Marie Antoinette compares favorably to The New World and, more so, to The Lost City—two tales of Edens stripped of their fruit. Andy Garcia's ode to his bygone Cuba had no room in its limited imagination for the country's impoverished masses, but that was because Garcia only understood what was taken away from his family. Coppola's vision is not so pathological: The poor (and their methods of execution) do not figure in her film because Marie Antoinette, like her equally juvenile king, Louis the XVI (Jason Schwartzman), had no concept of proletarian existence, holed up as they were inside their palace away from France's starving, unhappy populace. Their heartache is of a different sort: the horror of having their personal lives on constant display before a snippy and prying court, which prominently includes Molly Shannon and Shirley Henderson as very funny ladies in waiting and Asia Argento as the very cruel Madame du Barry, the cat to Dunst's canary.

Coppola is obsessed with Marie Antoinette's pleasure, holding out her hand and contriving for her a series of mini revolutions (she claps, to everyone's shock, after a court performance and, later, carries on an affair with a gorgeous and virile soldier) in order to hint at the girl's desire to react against that which was preordained—to carve out her own space away from the busy hands of oppression. Cynics will reduce these moments to feminist fiddling, but they are, in fact, very humane considerations of the corset-like effect ritual had on Marie Antoinette's will. The film is a great fashion show but it is also constitutes a great makeover—an elegy to frustration, where every color and sound evokes the longing and rapture of a girl who did not understand her adult responsibility. "Am I here?" the girl asks while playing the drinking game known to us as Celebrity. Her answer is implied later, when she bows to the barbarians outside her gate. It registers: "I am here." Remarkably, Coppola doesn't ask us to take Marie Antoinette as she thinks she was but as she probably was: a little girl who didn't know better.

Ed Gonzalez
© slant magazine, 2006.

[flipp525]

She was actually referring to brioche, a poor man's bread, when saying "cake". FYI. ???

It’s never been confirmed whether or not she actually ever said that. In fact, I think it’s pretty widely accepted that this quote was mistakenly attributed to her for political reasons. On the other hand, our very own modern-day Marie Antoinette, the former First Lady Barbara Bush, most definitely did say that the aftermath events of Hurricane Katrina were “working out quite well” for the predominantly black victims then living in the Astrodome.

[Sabin]

Lisa Schwarzbaum sez "B+"


Pampered princess, poor little rich girl, misused celebrity, lonely bubblehead, underappreciated trendsetter who misses her subscription to the 18th-century equivalent of TEEN PEOPLE — the adolescent queen envisioned by writer-director Sofia Coppola in Marie Antoinette is, at one time or other, all of these lost clotheshorses. And since this is Ms. Coppola we're talking about, stylish and soft-spoken Godfather royalty from the Hollywood kingdom herself, it's tempting to read autobiographical identification into the filmmaker's madly chic, tauntingly shallow biopic, set during the young queen's married life. Following Lost in Translation (in which a lonely, effortlessly hip girl rattled around Japan), here's Coppola's Lost in Versailles. In this rarefied universe, the privileged go shopping while, unseen and unheard until the very end when they storm the palace, the less style-conscious masses apparently get by on their own.

It's tempting to search for autobiography, yes, but too easy: This yummy-looking, artfully personal historical fantasia, borne on currents of melancholy and languor and rocking out to a divine soundtrack of 1980s New Romantic pop music (plenty of the Cure, Bow Wow Wow, and Adam Ant), is the work of a mature filmmaker who has identified and developed a new cinematic vocabulary to describe a new breed of post-postpostfeminist woman. And that contemporary creature is also of the artist's own invention.

Call that girl…Kirsten Dunst, a vision of bewildered loveliness as the 14-year-old Marie of Austria, betrothed, in a political deal, to the even more bewildered 15-year-old future Louis XVI of France, played by Jason Schwartzman. (The marriage was famously unconsummated for seven years due to the child king's withering lack of sexual know-how.) With her winning touch of girlfriend-of-Spider-Man resilience and the easy, modern way she wears her formidable ball gowns, Dunst embodies the teen girl of today and of more than 200 years ago. And in returning to the star of her first feature, The Virgin Suicides, as muse, the filmmaker wisely lets Dunst set the movie's tone of voluptuous lostness.

Marie Antoinette uses Antonia Fraser's marvelous 2001 biography as a reference, but Coppola's movie views the world through the young queen's eyes. And eventually, that narrow POV loses focus and veers toward distractedness as the seriousness of the brewing revolution becomes clearer. Instead, friendless in an adopted country strangled by its own demands of etiquette (Judy Davis is a hoot as the worst of the sticklers, the Comtesse de Noailles) and unable to arouse her husband, Marie turns to luxury as solace — cakes, jewels, parties, shoes. Was she a flibbertigibbet, a casualty of gossip and mean press coverage, a Princess Diana before her time? Coppola's stranded royal suggests that at heart, Marie Antoinette was just a simple girl who wanted to have fun, and got her head handed to her.

[Big Magilla]

Local San Francisco TV critic James Rockey - Little Children ****, Flags of Our Fathers ** ("Haggis never met a cliche he didn't like"), Marie Antoinette * (only because the producers require he give it one, "a completely empty film").