Movie Review: Marie Antoinette

Sofia Coppola’s vacuous film Marie Antoinette (2006) is as decadent as the aristocratic world it portrays. The ingredients of this confection of a film include a high volume pop soundtrack, sumptuous costumes, Manolo Blahnik shoes, elaborately arranged dinners and desserts, and of course, the most luxurious set imaginable — Versailles. 
 
It is a shame that all this elegance and attention to visual detail was not also applied to the script. I must admit that I really, really want to like Sofia Coppola’s films, but she grates my feminist soul the wrong way. Off the top of my head, I can count but a handful of interesting women directors in Hollywood since the heyday of Dorothy Arzner and I am yearning for a woman with a unique style who is willing to take artistic risks but still make an enjoyable movie to burst onto the scene (Zoe Cassavetes has good lineage, but the response to the debut of her new film Broken English at Sundance has been disappointingly muted).

In Sofia Coppola’s case, it is hard to get enthusiastic about a woman director whose camera does not provide us a with new perspective on the lives of women. This is Coppola’s third film about troubled young women and rather than show us the world from the female protagonist’s point of view, we are invited to look voyeuristically upon these women as objects of male desire. 

The Virgin Suicides (1999) offered up the world of the Lisbon sisters from the perspective of the adolescent boys who lusted after them, complete with a male narrator. In Lost in Translation (2003) Scarlett Johansson spends half the film traipsing about her upscale Tokyo hotel in her underpants. Marie Antoinette continues in the same vein, inviting us to admire Marie Antoinette, played coquettishly by Kirsten Dunst, in her various stages of dress and undress.

Coppola rarely offers us access to the inner workings of Marie Antoinette’s mind. Most of the information about her comes in the form of salacious court gossip or in grand intonations of her mother, the great Maria Theresa of Austria (played ably by Marianne Faithfull), who writes her condescending letters imploring her to act in a more politically astute fashion that will benefit her family and her country of birth.    

Article Author: Catherine Munroe Hotes

A Canadian film critic with eclectic tastes ranging from Japanese anime to Classical Hollywood movies and from German Expressionism to spaghetti westerns.

Visit Catherine Munroe Hotes's author page — Catherine Munroe Hotes's Blog