Sofia Coppola’s anti-biopic Marie Antoinette opens with a blast of dissonant chords from post-punk group Gang of Four. “The problem of leisure/What to do for pleasure,” snarls frontman Don King as the opening credits (recalling Sex Pistols' typography) flash in hot pink. Briefly, our powdered-wig heroine (Kirsten Dunst, who starred in Coppola’s first film The Virgin Suicides) appears — lounging on a chaise surrounded by multi-layered cakes as a servant rubs her feet. Leisure, indeed.
While the opening alludes to the hedonistic lifestyle depicted later, it’s Marie Antoinette's most irreverent moment, exhibiting a self-awareness and moralizing absent from the rest of the film. Here we have the socialist Gang of Four singing about the dangers of excess, a visual representation of the historical figure’s most infamous (rumored) utterance (“Let them eat cake”), and a reference to the Sex Pistols' anti-royalist “God Save the Queen.” But the rest of the film is characterized by reverence toward its subject, as Coppola, using Antonia Fraser’s sympathetic biography, Marie Antoinette:The Journey, as her main source, attempts to paint a more humanistic portrait of the teen queen -- subverting the conventions of historical drama and biopic along the way.
Coppola does this by transforming a nation’s history into something deeply personal. Marie Antoinette does not resemble an historic epic, despite the lavish costumes and set, but, rather, a teenager’s diary. Coppola’s narrative follows the “greatest hits” structure employed in the standard biopic: Marie’s marriage to the Dauphin (played by an appropriately bumbling Jason Schwartzman) and induction into Versailles, the death of her father-in-law Louis XV (Rip Torn), her coronation, her famous quote, her banishment from Versailles. Yet Coppola never lingers on these important or ceremonious events, favoring the moments in between: Marie reading Rousseau to her friends outside, gambling on her eighteenth birthday party, guzzling champagne, wondering why her husband won’t have sex with her, wandering around Versailles, listening to the other ladies of the court gossip about her, crying behind closed doors.
Not the stuff of biopics, these tiny yet undeniably human moments create the film’s insular universe. Through cinematographer Lance Accord’s lens, Versailles (shot on location) is not so much opulent as it is otherworldly.
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