Too Much Too Soon

Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette is a victim of her own wealth.

by Sam Adams

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Bathed in golden light, Kirsten Dunst's Marie Antoinette leans back in her gilded chair, surrounded by feathers and fans. Sensuously sliding her finger through the frosting of a nearby cake, she indolently licks the sweetness from her finger, flashes the camera a coquettish but defiant grin, as if to say, "Yeah? So what?"

Following that cheeky tableau with the slashing chords of Gang of Four's "Natural's Not in It," Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette opens with a shotgun blast at the audience's preconceptions, both of the movie's subject and its style. This Marie will not be the vain class enemy of the popular imagination, imprisoned in the sugar-spun prison of the period piece. The movie's scorched-earth opening is just Coppola's way of reconstructing history on her own terms.

I'M YOUR FAN: Marie Antoinette (Kirsten Dunst) lives the good life.

Like The Virgin Suicides and Lost in Translation, Marie Antoinette is the story of a sexually ripe young woman imprisoned by privilege, adrift in a universe of hermetic luxury. But although Coppola's third feature rarely transgresses the borders of Versailles, the effect is less oppressive than in her earlier films. You don't have the sense of being hemmed in, airlessly confined in the filmmaker's private dollhouse. Unlike the soft-lit hallways of Translation's Japan, Marie's Versailles, substantially filmed in the real palace, is flooded with sun, a constant reminder of the outside world from which the movie's royals fatally insulate themselves.

Less desperately sad than Translation, Marie is a film of muted melancholy. The first word Marie speaks is an anguished cry for her pet puppy, taken from her along with her jewels and clothing as she symbolically passes from Austrian to French hands. Only 14 when she is named the Dauphine of France, Marie shows no signs of aging over the movie's 20-year span; she's already as grown-up as she'll ever be.

Drawing on Antoinia Fraser's sympathetic biography, Coppola makes Marie a victim of her own status, a pre-feminist princess whose body is wholly the property of the state. On the night of her wedding to the future Louis XVI (Jason Schwartzman), the teenage couple is tucked into bed by a throng of onlookers, all eager for her to fulfill her duty as the bearer of the next male heir.

Louis' reticence to perform his nuptial duties is not only a humiliation for the blushing bride, but as Steve Coogan's ambassador constantly reminds her, places her in mortal danger, since an unconsummated marriage can be annulled.

Although Coppola acknowledges that Louis' rejection was as much a political issue as a personal one, she focuses almost exclusively on Marie's wounded confusion, foregrounded as the impetus for the queen's famous profligacy. After Louis spurns her efforts to get something started in the marital bed (he'd rather play with antique locks), Coppola cues up a montage of fancy shoes and towering wigs, scored to Bow Wow Wow's "I Want Candy" (also the name of the movie's production company). Her Marie is not, or at least not only, a spoiled brat depleting a nation's coffers to sate her vanity, but a neglected wife shopping her way to self-healing.

Unabashedly modern if not blithely ahistorical, Coppola eschews continental accents and Shakespearean gesture. Rather than stocking her cast with the usual bland Brits, Coppola goes for vitality over polish. Rip Torn plays Louis XV as a lusty lion licking his chops for the frankly erotic Madame du Barry (Asia Argento), while Shirley Henderson and Molly Shannon are a pair of nattering court ladies whose backstabbing bitchiness charts the ebb and flow of Marie's fortunes. (Judy Davis' Comtesse de Noailles, the clucking embodiment of court protocol, comes the closest to the established template, but she doesn't look happy about it.)

For all its departures from the gilded certainties of period drama, Marie Antoinette is deeply faithful to its era, while at the same time being faithful to our own. Using New Order and Squarepusher on the soundtrack isn't Coppola's way of subverting the period piece but of stripping away its smothering varnish, making it personal for her and her audience both.

Coppola unabashedly takes Marie's side, blaming the depletion of France's coffers not on the queen's spending habits but on Louis' aid of the American Revolution (doubly ironic since the Americans' anti-royalist revolt provided inspiration for the king's downfall). Although she includes the queen's most famous (and probably apocryphal) utterance, it's presented only as hearsay, followed by Dunst's emphatic denial, "I would never say that!" Clearly in love with the budding queen's fashion sense, Coppola lets the audience eat cake, but the sugar-shock hangover is never far off. The sunbeams outside the palace turn to howls of rage, and the people, till now invisible, push Marie Antoinette right off the stage.

(sam@citypaper.net)

Marie Antoinette

Written and directed by Sofia CoppolaA Sony releaseOpens Friday at area theaters