Having Her Cake

Is the fan too much?: Kirsten Dunst plays the young Queen of France in the Sofia Coppola film Marie Antoinette. (Columbia Pictures)

Marie Antoinette never actually said, “Let them eat cake,” but she looked like a pretty little pastry, at least according to director Sofia Coppola’s sugar-spun take on the greatest celebrity wipeout of the 18th century. As played by Kirsten Dunst, Antoinette was a milk-skinned beauty with a pile of whipped cream hair, pink frosted cheeks and an obscene number of deliciously coloured shoes (designed by Manolo Blahnik, timeless foot-ier to the elite) sprinkled like hard candies around Versailles.

As the young Queen of France, Marie Antoinette’s hedonistic lifestyle — they gave her the un-catchy handle “Madame Deficit” for her profligate spending — proved the people’s tipping point, causing the French Revolution of the late 1700s that pushed out the monarchy and brought in the republic. Yet this isn’t so much a film about France as it is a film about the way royal life is imagined by little girls. Rarely after a rousing game of Princess does anyone play Starving Masses, so the fun stops just before things get gruesome. We don’t see the Queen leaving this world with her head on a stick, but we do, at length, watch the arrival at the muddy Austria-France border of a 14-year-old Austrian beauty who comes in cluelessness to unite two nations.

Girlhood, en route to womanhood, has been Coppola’s well-trod soil in her three impressive films: The Virgin Suicides, Lost in Translation and now Marie Antoinette. The third — and, she has said, final — in this unofficial trilogy moves as slowly and prettily as the others. For all her youthful hipster cool, Coppola is anti-MTV; she knows how to let things breathe. If there is something a touch icky about turning the French Revolution into a metaphor for the narcissism of youth, Coppola, all shrugging SoCal attitude, might say something Antoinette-ish: Let them watch PBS.

In recent years, former villain Marie Antoinette has received the revisionist treatment in many biographies, and Coppola adapts her script from the most famous, Antonia Fraser’s Marie Antoinette: The Journey. But Coppola dumps the material into a giant sieve, and many pertinent historical details don’t make it into the film. Instead, Coppola is interested in Marie as teen queen, another of the director’s half-formed beauties trying to find agency, this time with Paris Hilton-level access and a nicer disposition. Yes, Marie Antoinette is kind of nice, just epically self-involved, which is a problem for most teens but an unfortunate quality in an all-powerful ruler. The queen-in-waiting lives a painfully public life: she bathes in front of the court, and has sex with her husband while the court waits outside the brocade curtains (George Clooney and Co. should stop whining about a few paparazzi).

At least, she should be having sex, but Louis XVI (Jason Schwartzman) is a shy, rotund creature not inept in bed, but too emotionally paralyzed to try. The pressure isn’t exactly in his mind only: The need for an heir is the obsession of two empires, and it takes seven years and a stern talking-to from Marie Antoinette’s brother (Danny Huston) for Louis to get it right and produce a child (all that and it’s a girl).

The husband hunts, the wife shops, and the palace cringes. Judy “Neck Tendon” Davis as Comtesse de Noailles is particularly appalled at Marie Antoinette’s go-go party girl lifestyle, though she and her finger wagging seem to vanish half way through the film. When Louis XV (Rip Torn) contracts smallpox (like everything in this fantasy of the fantasy, even smallpox is tidy; he looks like he died of a head cold), the kids take over the candy store. Poignantly, at the inauguration, the new King looks to the sky and asks: “God help us for we are too young to reign.”

We'll party like it's 1779: Marie Antoinette's lover, Axel von Fersen (Jamie Dornan), joins her at a ball. (Columbia Pictures)

Marie Antoinette wants to loosen up the palace, although her reforms amount to little more than sneaking out for a masked ball and snubbing boring royals. Still, Marie Antoinette’s rebellion is a relevant idea for her time considering how dissociated she was from France at large; what she knows of life outside of Versailles is learned in the opera in Paris. Less Laura Bush than Maggie Trudeau, this high-profile wife has a creative streak — she puts on a play to the King’s delight — and a pooh-pooh-protocol inclination. For all of this, she is at first loved by her subjects, and then, to put it mildly, loathed, and dragged through ye olde tabloids.

Coppola shows more than she says, and she shows it beautifully. Scenes are set to a punk-pop soundtrack that doesn’t feel separate from the film, nor, as with Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo +Juliet, a come-on for the under-18 demographic. The songs, by artists including Bow Wow Wow and the Cure, are meticulously chosen and relevant; plus, the film rocks. The opening image — Marie Antoinette getting a Manolo fitting while downing some pink confection — is backed by Gang of Four singing: “The problem with pleasure/what to do for leisure.”

The song is called Natural’s Not In It, and nature (of a kind) is where Marie Antoinette goes to hide from the multitude of eyes upon her.  She takes refuge at the estate le Petit Trianon, a faux farm that turns the outdoors into just another fashion trend. Coppola cheerfully steals from Terrence Malick, catching Marie Antoinette in prisms of sunlight and open fields, the opposite of artifice. There, the Queen takes a lover, the pretty boy Swedish soldier Count Ferson (Jamie Dornan). Meanwhile, the ladies in waiting cavort in milkmaid dresses, let down their Marge Simpsons and laugh at the novelty of picking strawberries. “You must taste this milk, it’s divine,” says Marie Antoinette, and with this naïve, ugly line, it’s the Queen who is revolting, not her people.

In fact, Coppola’s Marie Antoinette is hardly a heroine; the excesses of her reign are as obscene to us as they were to the French people. So how are we to care about her? As a character study, the film falls short, but this seems unavoidable: Empathy would be impossible and loathing would be boring. But the viewer is left stranded in a strange emotional limbo, digging the excitement but never quite finding a point of connection with the subject. When Marie Antoinette makes the transition from silly girl to a loyal woman who stands by her husband and steps up to an angry mob, it is difficult to muster much cheer for her coming-of-age moment.

Still, Marie Antoinette is riotous fun. Some will find the whole enterprise lacking the weight appropriate for such an historical juggernaut. But costume dramas with sonorous British accents (the American accents seem strange at first, but why is it okay for all Europeans in period pieces to have British accents?) and righteous historical distance — those films already exist in abundance. A film as playful and unusual as Marie Antoinette, shot through the entirely modern lenses of celebrity and consumption, is unique. Now it’s time for Coppola to leave the princesses behind and start a new kind of movie revolution.

Marie Antoinette opens across Canada Oct. 20.

Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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