Marie Antoinette - 2006 - Film

Friday, November 24, 2006

Marie Antoinette is lovely for its scenery, for its graceful long shots, elegant costumes, poetic choreography, and for Kirsten Dunst, who, by virtue of her thorough dedication to the characters she plays is one of the best actresses in Hollywood. When you watch Dunst her star persona simply fades away and she is completely that character. With Dunst, director Sofia Coppola gives us one of the prettiest-looking films of the year, not only through the highly stylized costumes and makeup that create this version of Marie Antoinette (Dunst) that looks like a cross between the eighteenth-century and 1980s pop culture, but through every inch of the set that seems to be coated in shiny pink icing. Ironically, the silence that befell Marie Antoinette in its long, picturesque scenes is exactly what brings its energy to a dead halt.

Coppola's last film Lost in Translation (2003) was quiet in terms of dialogue, which made sense thematically since its lead characters played by Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson, as Americans in Tokyo, literally could not communicate verbally--their characters really are lost in translation. Marie Antoinette looks like it is riding on the fumes of Coppola's former film with the same kind of muted peace, but the momentum of the two stories are too disparate to pace at Lost's cadence.

Marie Antoinette (Kirsten Dunst) is fourteen when she arrives in Versailles to rule with King Louis XVI (Jason Schwartzman), himself a teenager at the time. The story, based on Antonia Fraser's book "Marie Antoinette: The Journey," is a revised history of the infamous queen's life, which adds a little more sheen to her character than has been popularly thought. What intrigued Coppola about the story was how much pressure this teen was under. She had to give up her former life: her friends, family, clothing, everything. Then she was put in charge of a country. How would a contemporary teen deal with such pressure, Coppola wondered? To see, she tried it out with Dunst and Schwartzman, punching up the costume drama with a stellar soundtrack and a lot of bright color, but the movement of everything she tints with her retro nostalgia sit still, they hardly react. It was clear that Coppola was commenting on celebrity lifestyle, and perhaps her own rather privileged upbringing. But rather than explain the emotional and mental consequences this kind of responsibility and fame burdens upon someone so young and impressionable, there are long, almost still shots of scenes that simply present the problems, as means for our observation.

They are beautiful scenes to observe, I'm the first to become entranced by their depth and detail. Without Coppola to guide us through the long shots with more sympathy, and maybe even a little mockery of Marie's extravagant lifestyle, however, we don't leave the theater seeing eye-to-eye with her, which is after all, the purpose of the story.