Eat, Drink, and Wait for the Revolution
Marie Antoinette
The New York Sun, October 20, 2006
There's a strangely wise conversation in 1971's "Harold and Maude," when ancient, youthful Maude explains her radical past to youthful, ancient Harold: "Big issues. Liberty. Rights. Justice. Kings died, kingdoms fell.I don't regret the kingdoms, but I miss the kings."
Sofia Coppola, I suspect, feels much the same way. Her bewitching, delirious, pastels-and-candy "Marie Antoinette" combines a sardonic critique of the Versailles system with a wry, understanding portrait of those kings, queens, and courtiers who were supported, ensnared and, ultimately, doomed by it.
We catch our first glimpse of the great palace as Marie Antoinette (Kirsten Dunst) arrives from Austria to take up residence as bride to Louis (Jason Schwartzman), the dauphin of France. The architectural wonders (lovingly, lavishly photographed, this movie is a treat for the eyes, and flatters a court that was far grubbier than anything Ms. Coppola permits us to see) are an illusion, however, nothing more than camouflage for a complex instrument of social control, carefully sustained by baroque protocol, ornate coercion, and elaborately manipulated human nature. This idea of the court as a mechanism is one that Ms. Coppola underpins with frequent long distance shots of its massive architecture and immense gardens. They dwarf the few humans visible, reducing them all, even that lovely, bewildered queen, to dots, tiny, insignificant, nothing more than cogs in a machine.
But it's a machine that is unable to adapt. Like the fountains we see dancing their perfect dance in deserted gardens deep into the Versailles dusk, the passing of time has reduced the court's immaculate choreography to a wasteful irrelevance. Louis XIV had designed this system as a way of harnessing the pre-modern appeal of monarchy, an institution as old as the apes, to the construction of a recognizably modern, centralized French state, but after 100 years, modernity itself has become the enemy. In an enormously more developed society l'état could no longer be Louis, any Louis. Louis XVI may have been an awkward, amiable dunderhead (Mr. Schwartzman's performance, channeling Robert Morley from the 1938 version of this tale, is sympathetic, touching, and, ultimately heart-breaking), but even the Sun King would have struggled to shine in the France of the 1780s.
If Ms. Coppola's depiction of the consequences is something of a caricature (it is), there's more than a touch of truth in the way she depicts these ill-fated, oblivious aristocrats as up-market, somewhat bitchy Eloi playing their games amid the relics of a civilization that has long since had its day. Their rituals and rules have descended into self-parody and farce, something beautifully illustrated by a (historically accurate) scene in which a naked Marie Antoinette stands shivering as various ladies-in-waiting work out among themselves who has the right to hand the queen her shift. Likewise, while the director exaggerates the extent to which the queen's set lived apart from the rest of the world, she only does so to emphasize just how dangerously isolated they had become from what was going on outside their self-absorbed, parasitical, magical court.
A sequence filmed at the chateau that played host to Marie Antoinette's rural idylls makes this point perfectly: Surrounded by golden greenery, golden friends, and golden sunlight, the golden queen, gorgeous in white muslin, sits happily reading Rousseau's paeans to the simple life, the glories of nature, and, for all I know, the general niceness of mankind. The idea that the writings of that same Jean-Jacques might inspire the revolutionaries who were later to execute her, her husband, and, for that matter, tear one of those golden friends quite literally apart did not, could not, occur to her.
Of course, it's important to understand that this film is not, as Ms. Dunst has admitted, "a ‘Masterpiece Theatre,' educational Marie Antoinette biopic." It is, the actress said, "kind of like a history of feelings rather than a history of facts," a description which is kind of like nauseating, but is also kind of like right.
If anything, Ms. Dunst is too modest. By Hollywood standards, this movie is well researched, its sins mainly those of omission (although not entirely: Contrary to what's shown in the movie, the real queen drank very little), not that those are trivial. This is a Marie Antoinette without the necklace (that scandal is never mentioned), but who keeps her neck. The last three to four years of her life, years in which she finally achieved a certain tragic dignity, don't feature at all, but perhaps they don't need to.After all, we witness her refusal to abandon Louis as the revolution grew, and we see the bravery with which she faced the mob that had stormed Versailles.The rest is history.
This movie is best seen as a wild, inventive and inspired riff, stylized and stylish, on the life and legend of Marie Antoinette. At times it's playful: There's enough cake in this film to reduce even Monty Python's Mr. Creosote to jelly; but purists should relax — it's made clear that she never said, you know, that. At times it's moving, as Ms. Coppola depicts the plight of a young girl (14 when she married), lost in translation (sound familiar?), wrenched from her home and dumped into a strange and sporadically hostile land, a future queen maybe, but a pawn in Europe's dynastic game, and a queen who would have to wait seven years to mate with a king who just didn't know how (his Habsburg brother-in-law, played by Danny Huston, eventually explains). And at times, often involving appearances by the splendid Asia Argento as Madame Du Barry, that most rococo of royal mistresses, it's very funny indeed.
And yes, Ms. Coppola's maligned decision to add 1980s rock music to the soundtrack works surprisingly well. We remember the 1980s, if not always accurately, as an age of abandon, extravagance, reaction, and revolution, impressions conjured by hearing those old tunes again, impressions that do rather well for the 1780s, too. But for all this film's cleverness, it would have not succeeded without the extraordinary, almost hypnotic, performance by Ms. Dunst (her best since, well, Ms. Coppola's "The Virgin Suicides") as the fabulously indulged, fabulously abused Marie Antoinette of Ms. Coppola's vision, driven quite literally to distraction by the weird predicament in which she found herself.
Oh, don't worry that this film was booed at Cannes earlier this year. It means nothing. The French aren't the French unless they have Marie Antoinette to kick around.