Love and marriage
There’s enough quirky brilliance in Sofia Coppola’s offbeat approach to this period-piece biopic that I wouldn’t mind seeing it again.
The movie cast only an intermittent and rather erratic spell on opening night at the Pageant (with early projection problems adding to the distractions). But even as it struggled to maintain some sort of momentum, Coppola’s elaborate concoction kept throwing off odd sparks of surprise right on through to its obliquely imaged evocation of the title character’s storied demise in the French Revolution.
Based on Antonia Fraser’s myth-bucking biography and filmed on location in Versailles, Coppola’s film embraces the sumptuousness of the palatial settings and period costumes while viewing the characters and events of Marie’s story with a deadpan irony that sometimes veers toward absurdist farce. The layering-in of a pop-music soundtrack and some anachronistic-sounding dialogue pointedly undercuts both the pageantry of the court and the conventional pomp and circumstance of historical romance in the movies and elsewhere.
In this paradoxically iconoclastic scheme of things, Kirsten Dunst makes a properly provocative Marie Antoinette—a vivacious teenaged Austrian princess bustled into a politically advantageous marriage with the royal twit who would soon become the doomed Louis XVI. And Jason Schwartzman’s throwaway wackiness in the role of Louis XVI just may be the film’s most emblematic performance.
Rip Torn (as Louis XV) and Judy Davis (as the Comtesse de Noailles) are the standouts in an attractive supporting cast that includes Asia Argento (as Madame du Barry), Rose Byrne, Steve Coogan, Danny Huston and Marianne Faithfull. But this is not a film full of big moments for actors—Coppola uses them mainly as curiously deceptive icons in her combinations of historical panorama and spectacular anti-epic.
