Marie Antoinette (2006)
Written and directed by Sofia Coppola
Columbia
2006
Rating:


Sofia Coppola's "Marie Antoinette" re-imagines the stifling historical epic as a teen movie. Of course, as it's driven by Coppola's superb since of ennui and her Balthus-worthy eye for placing young women in artistic repose, this is not just another teen movie. Coppola interprets the treatment of the Austrian Marie Antoinette (Kirsten Dunst) in Versailles like an 18th-century "Mean Girls": she's subject to gossip, suffers from alienation and indulges in rebellious shopping in retaliation against the oppressive scandalmongers. "Marie Antoinette" elicits sympathy for a queen who's easier seen as a monster. Coppola knows that, like even the worst high school prom queen, Marie Antoinette is more complex than that.

The decision to score the movie to the 1980s new wave and post-punk music of New Order, The Cure, Adam and the Ants and Siouxsie and the Banshees seems to be as much about framing her tale in the context of "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" as using it to strive for post-modern emotional truth. Although it does that, too. There have been few greater uses of music in 2006 than the scoring of Marie Antoinette's reverie to Gang of Four's "Natural's Not in It," the shopping spree of Bow Wow Wow's "I Want Candy" and the coronation of The Cure's grand "Plainsong." Each song conveys through music what most stuffy historical epics never truly convey: feeling.

Besides subverting all preconceived notions of historical epics, that seems to be the point of "Marie Antoinette": it might not be historical, but it feels true.

Posted Saturday, January 20, 2007

Link to this review:
http://filmzeus.pressbin.com/film/marie.antoinette.2006