S and I watched Sophia Coppola's "Marie Antoinette" last night. I recently read Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution, so I was keen to see how accurate Coppola ended up being with the history. It ended up being fairly accurate, and I didn't spend too much time saying, "Oh, that didn't happen." Mostly, I ended up clarifying things for S, because there was no sense of TIME in the movie, and I think that's possibly one of the more important aspects of the Queen's story; it's important to understand that she spent millions of francs, but it's even more important to understand that she did it for 20-something years. Knowing that can certainly shed some light on the fact that she was so hated, and for so long. It wasn't just her fault that France went broke, and the people starved, but you can't deny she had something to do with it. And time doesn't just affect her profligate spending; I think it's also hard to gain perspective on how hard her early life at court was unless you understand just how long she and Louis went without doing anything that might produce an heir--and then after they timidly began the consummation of their marriage, just how long she went without bearing a child. Her position was incredibly tenous, and Coppola is trying to get that across, and I'm not sure it worked. I'll say this: I didn't feel half as much for Dunst's MA as I did for the book's version of the Queen.
The other thing that really bothered me was music. I'm not against rock music in a period piece, if it's used right. I enjoyed the use of modern music in the actually horrible (but who cares? I still like it.) movie "A Knight's Tale", because I thought it gave something interesting to the film. Coppola's use of punk rock is so spotty--I don't think that we heard punk for the first 50 or so minutes of the film, and that bothered me. I believe that Coppola, in those first 50 minutes, was making a very conscious decision; the music only got loud and modern when MA's life at court began to flower. And it's interesting to see a decked-out Queen running through Versailles (I will say, Versailles and the Petit Trianon shine in this movie; it made me want to go back to France, and I don't even really like France) to the strains of the Strokes, but it somehow turned this film into two separate pieces, and it didn't work for me.
The accelerated pace of the end didn't work for me either. I don't think you can really understand WHY the crowds are rioting at the end. I don't think you get a sense of just WHAT the problem actually is, and why Louis and Marie and their children are forced into a carriage and forced to leave Versailles, forever. I did spend a few minutes after the film ended explaining just how dire things were to S, because I'm not sure the film displayed that urgency. I did admire the last scene, and how Coppola ended the film. At first, I thought it was a weird choice, to not show the year or two of degradation that the royal family would endure, but then, reconsidering, I decided it was actually brilliant to let a degraded room stand in for everything that would eventually happen to the family. Sadly, though, I'm not sure that the majority of persons viewing the film do know what happened eventually (the imprisonment, the beheadings), and so I'm not sure how effective it was for everyone. It worked for me, but I knew in detail what was about to happen.
And actually, one of the most memorable and provoking scenes in the book, for me, is when MA, imprisoned with her young son, the Dauphin, and her daughter, the Madame Royale, hears the crowd cheering and understands then that her husband, the King, has been beheaded. There are no courtiers around, no subjects anymore, and so it is left to MA to echo the phrase that has always been--"Le Roi est Mort, Vive le Roi!" It is the phrase she and Louis would have heard years before, and it is a phrase that sums up her entire life. And she said it, and short months later, the young pretender would be dead, and she herself would be dead. She never let go of who she was, even in awful circumstances, and I'm not sure we get a sense of that from the film, either. Which is too bad, because it's stuck with me for a few weeks.
But the film is beautiful, and lush, and it's not unpleasant to look at. It wasn't a wasted two hours, but rather feels like a two hours that could have been so much better. If only the movie was a little better.
Comments