Seen: April 15th, 2007
Format: DVD
Rating: 4
Man, I just can't get a grip on Sophia Coppola. Maybe her genius is beyond me. Maybe she's a spoiled second generation filmmaker who's even more abstruse than her father. Maybe we just have different taste.
Marie Antoinette left a stale one.
Let's focus on the positives to start. This film won an Oscar for costume design. There's a lot of amazing costumes in this film. Manolo Blahnik made "hundreds" of custom shoes for this film. If you know who that is and what that means, and are impressed, see this film now. In all sincerity, the overall production design for this film is remarkable. There are parts of it that I don't agree with, but the effect was stunning.
The part that I about the production design that I didn't particularly enjoy speaks to the heart of my problem with this film. Coppola has chosen to compare Marie Antoinette with a modern young woman. The choice of modern colors in the period clothing, the intentional anachronism in the closet, the choice of modern pop overlaying modern montages, the anachronistic dancing, all this attempts to transport her across the centuries to our time.
I not sure of Coppola's intent here. The seems to be to paint Marie Antoinette as a softer character that popular history does, to expose some other truth behind the ancient propaganda. She's portrayed as a naive, unsophisticated teenager flung into a strange world of stifling structure. Her joie de vivre is systematically quashed and when she ultimately gains her freedom, in the form of the death of her father-in-law, she rebels in the fashion that seals her fate.
Why we're supposed to forgive these sybaritic indulgences is beyond me. Applying our own values and mores to a historical figure 200+ years dead is as pointless as pretending that we really understand and can judge someone from a culture we've never experienced, much less been formed by. If Coppola expects us to believe that she was just a mis-understood teenager stifled by the system, why go to trouble to re-create the period so carefully? Are we suppose to believe that the because most of the details seem accurate, that this version of history is the real one?
This is the primary problem for me. The detail and opulence that goes into re-creating the period is at odds with and ultimately undermined by the way Marie Antoinette is characterized. The modern inferences heighten this tension and in the end devices sever the otherwise very well constructed period setting.
Perhaps I'm the dunce here. Perhaps this juxtaposition is genius, it's certainly creative. In the end, it just leaves me a bit perplexed and a little bit bored.
The Good: A new view of an old monarch
The Bad: Not historical, not drama, what is this exactly?
The Ugly: Indie cred plays dress-up
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