Marie Antoinette

Sugar coated, pink ruffled, kudos to Sofia Coppolla, Marie Antoinette rocks.

To those who didn’t like it because it lacked a plot “bob loblaw, whatever”. That’s not the point. It’s one of those movies like Girl With A Pearl Earring where you are to become entranced by the sight and movements of the film itself, and you need not be engaged by a thick plot.

But it’s not all pink and ruffles. Coppolla is a voice of this generation. Marie Antoinette is an anachronism; she parties hard, loves fashion and puppies and cute boys and is absorbed in the world that extends no further than the Court. (Or perhaps the royals really were like that.)

However, you are struck that Marie Antoinette is a girl of these times. After her lavish birthday party, she and her friends run outside with bottles in hand to watch the sunrise, as any young person might do today on New Years. The camera never leaves the glowing faces of the group, though, it focuses exclusively on their experience of the sunrise, not the sunrise itself, because this generation values experience in and of itself far above the content of that experience.

Note also that you never see the grimy, poverty stricken streets of Paris, which are the necessary consequences of the royals’ luxurious lifestyle. When you finally see the peasants revolting outside the Bastille, it feels like a Sim City game; when you’ve been too busy building blocks and blocks of houses and have neglected the pollution problem and suddenly there’s a Japanese monster stomping across your city. Because the farce of a royal family have been myopically living it up in the parlour they only do something about the condition of their nation when it comes banging on their chamber doors.

Kirstin Dunst does a good job of a girl who wakes up one morning as the Queen of France. The momentous moments such as being handed over to France, marriage, the death of a king and the coronation of Louis XVI, are experienced without the appropriate accompanying emotion, and simply roll over Marie Antoinette. It reminds me of not feeling like you’ve graduated, even though you’ve been to the ceremony. The numbness is accentuated by Louis XVI’s unwillingness to consummate; the monochromatic marriage feels like no marriage at all. It is only the celebrations without occasion and the forbidden love which elicit excitement and happiness in Marie Antoinette.

I also thoroughly enjoyed this movie on an aesthetic level. It makes me want to have a Marie Antoinette party with pink cakes and biscuits and sugar flowers and colourful ribboned shoes and pretty frocks. No guys would come. Except maybe Angus. ;)

(I'm not sure if this is intentional or not, but in one of the "shoe shopping" scenes, I'm pretty sure there's a pair of converses. Can anyone confirm this? It appears for only a split second of course.)