B | The last queen of France deals with a distant husband and a whispering court. Directed by Sofia Coppola Starring Kirsten Dunst, Jason Schwartzman, and Rose Byrne Review by Jon Kissel |
Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, my favorite book, doesn’t introduce its protagonist or any of its main characters for its first sixty pages. As is typical of sprawling 19th century novels, the lengthy prologue is given over to historical scene-setting through the eyes of a minor character, the bishop who will set Jean Valjean on his path to redemption. One of these early chapters is given over to the bishop’s encounter with a dying revolutionary who was present at the major events of the French Revolution some decades earlier. The bishop starts off indignant about all the crimes of the Reign of Terror, especially against Queen Marie Antoinette and her children, but the revolutionary grants him sympathy for them if he’ll extend the same sympathy to the millions who suffered under absolute monarchy. Focusing on well-known sufferers is a choice that lacks scope and imagination, memorably described by Hugo as taking in the thunderbolt and ignoring the storm clouds that made it possible. Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette is all thunderbolt, a fatally flawed film whose considerable style and technical mastery cannot overshadow how perverse it is to frame Madame Deficit as any kind of victim of the patriarchy. History or feminism owes this person nothing, and no small amount of pleasure is taken from knowing that many of the people onscreen , including her, are going to get theirs. However, if a film is going to be this unnecessary, it may as well be as fun as this one is.
Coppola kicks off her film with pop guitar strings and a seductive look by Kirsten Dunst’s queen directly into camera, not wasting any time in placing Marie Antoinette outside of any period film propriety. The anachronisms are not just on the soundtrack, but in the film’s presentism for modern audiences. Being nude in front of staff would not be a big deal for high nobles, but Coppola’s camera interprets it as off-putting as it would seem today. Her Marie Antoinette is a modern creature within the deep absurdity of the aristocratic rituals of the most entrenched monarchy in 18th century Europe. This endears her to the viewer as an outsider and an audience surrogate, as any work that centers Marie Antoinette must. Strip away all the politics of this arrangement and the story is true enough. A teen girl was removed from her family and sent to marry a man she had never met in a new country, where she was never embraced by the court and the populace thanks to her husband’s general uselessness and her unshakable status as a foreign queen who can’t be trusted. Coppola locates this nugget in the historical record and makes Marie Antoinette into one of her alienated protagonists, sheltered from struggle by wealth but still susceptible to boredom and ennui and unable to put aside their toys in exchange for any kind of meaningful expression, as Coppola herself was able to. She sensed a kindred spirit and perhaps made a film about the part of herself that wishes she could turn her brain off and just gamble and eat desserts and try on shoes in magnificent montages.
If Coppola wanted to do that, the world would miss out on her future work but nothing greater that that would be lost or taken from society. For Marie Antoinette to do so is a different story. Her household budget is money that could be spent anywhere else, or not collected from the third estate in the first place. There are no scenes of the average French peasant struggling in the countryside during the period of particular privation that existed in this timeframe, brought on by bad weather and clumsy mismanagement. The film leaves it up to the viewer to calculate how many loaves of bread could be made for the worth of one of Marie Antoinette’s dresses that will be worn once and hang in a closet for the rest of its life. Her bubble is the film’s. I’ve seen Marie Antoinette several times, and this viewing was focused on any side-eye that Coppola weasels in. It’s there in her nonchalance when told about how her conscience-absolving charities are suffering amidst her overspending, to which she responds that she’ll ask her husband Louis XVI (Jason Schwartzman) to cover the difference. A few shots are saved for the help that exists to either prepare the way for Marie Antoinette or to clean up in her wake. The cluttered aftermath of a party, all melted cream and candlewax, is slowly taken in, while my favorite scene of the film takes place at the queen’s fake cottage, where she allows herself to pretend she’s the wife of a farmer. The morning’s eggs are cleaned off and put back in their nests before Marie Antoinette and her daughter arrive to collect them, spared any interaction with the less-than pristine conditions that prop up her idyllic existence.
Coppola is ultimately uninterested in skewering her lead because there’s so much else here in need of skewering. A more thoughtful queen is not what this situation requires or would accept. The political stakes for her are to produce male heirs. Anything beyond that is out of her job description. The film implies that she’s smart enough to understand this and doesn’t pointlessly fight against the status quo. She’s left to navigate various no-win scenarios. Freeze out Louis XV’s (Rip Torn) mistress (Daria Argento) and endear yourself to the catty princesses (Molly Shannon and Shirley Henderson). Say a single remark to her and calm a potential scandal, but set the princesses to slander. Find peace at your cottage, but alienate the court who lives on favors and the order on which they’re greeted in the morning. She’s the subject of whispers about her spending and vapidity, while the king hunts and fiddles with locks and spends vastly more than the queen’s gambling budget on foreign adventurism in America whose main purpose is not the furtherance of any national interest but the embarrassment of another great power. The film doesn’t have in its head the ability to say the Revolution was correct and inevitable and wholly justified, but there is enough here to say that Coppola at least has no wish to elevate the world of the film beyond the seductive appeal of wealth that someone like Martin Scorsese frequently indulges in.
There had to have been some way for Coppola to more rigorously incorporate a critique or a hint at the righteous fury that’s building within France, because there are few films that I’d like to praise more than this one. This is as good as it gets for Coppola in regards to costuming and set design, thanks in part to the full cooperation of Versailles. Within this state of total opulence, she and cinematographer Lance Acord put together one stunning tableau after another, each worthy of the same kind of artistic immortalization that hangs on the Versailles walls. Dunst is incredibly magnetic and Schwartzman is fully dedicated to making Louis as awkward and pathetic as the real Louis XVI. The extensive supporting cast feels exactly right in their comfort level with this world and their ability to fit into it, from Torn’s lecherous king to Jamie Dornan’s swagger as a dashing war hero. I want to elevate this film to the highest plain of praise because Coppola’s a major 21st century auteur and this could credibly be at the top of her filmography.
Ultimately, I just know too much about this period of history to turn that part of my brain off. Setting aside the details that the film weirdly gets wrong, like the number of children she had and when they died or the much more dramatic circumstances of the uprising depicted late in the film, it’s simply impossible for me to be onboard with the film’s premise. There is a lay reading of Marie Antoinette that finds sympathy for her as an individual, but the long process that will lead to her ignominious end removes her individuality and makes her body into a collection of political power, in the same way everyone in the court is not a person but a manifestation of the state. Therefore, ripping her to shreds, as the participants in the uprising would surely have done if they caught her at Versailles, would not have been grisly murder as much as it would have been political rebellion on the part of people who have no other recourse to power. This is the world that the French monarchy created on purpose, and its fracturing is not cause for concern but praise. No amount of filmmaking can overpower that essential truth. B
If Coppola wanted to do that, the world would miss out on her future work but nothing greater that that would be lost or taken from society. For Marie Antoinette to do so is a different story. Her household budget is money that could be spent anywhere else, or not collected from the third estate in the first place. There are no scenes of the average French peasant struggling in the countryside during the period of particular privation that existed in this timeframe, brought on by bad weather and clumsy mismanagement. The film leaves it up to the viewer to calculate how many loaves of bread could be made for the worth of one of Marie Antoinette’s dresses that will be worn once and hang in a closet for the rest of its life. Her bubble is the film’s. I’ve seen Marie Antoinette several times, and this viewing was focused on any side-eye that Coppola weasels in. It’s there in her nonchalance when told about how her conscience-absolving charities are suffering amidst her overspending, to which she responds that she’ll ask her husband Louis XVI (Jason Schwartzman) to cover the difference. A few shots are saved for the help that exists to either prepare the way for Marie Antoinette or to clean up in her wake. The cluttered aftermath of a party, all melted cream and candlewax, is slowly taken in, while my favorite scene of the film takes place at the queen’s fake cottage, where she allows herself to pretend she’s the wife of a farmer. The morning’s eggs are cleaned off and put back in their nests before Marie Antoinette and her daughter arrive to collect them, spared any interaction with the less-than pristine conditions that prop up her idyllic existence.
Coppola is ultimately uninterested in skewering her lead because there’s so much else here in need of skewering. A more thoughtful queen is not what this situation requires or would accept. The political stakes for her are to produce male heirs. Anything beyond that is out of her job description. The film implies that she’s smart enough to understand this and doesn’t pointlessly fight against the status quo. She’s left to navigate various no-win scenarios. Freeze out Louis XV’s (Rip Torn) mistress (Daria Argento) and endear yourself to the catty princesses (Molly Shannon and Shirley Henderson). Say a single remark to her and calm a potential scandal, but set the princesses to slander. Find peace at your cottage, but alienate the court who lives on favors and the order on which they’re greeted in the morning. She’s the subject of whispers about her spending and vapidity, while the king hunts and fiddles with locks and spends vastly more than the queen’s gambling budget on foreign adventurism in America whose main purpose is not the furtherance of any national interest but the embarrassment of another great power. The film doesn’t have in its head the ability to say the Revolution was correct and inevitable and wholly justified, but there is enough here to say that Coppola at least has no wish to elevate the world of the film beyond the seductive appeal of wealth that someone like Martin Scorsese frequently indulges in.
There had to have been some way for Coppola to more rigorously incorporate a critique or a hint at the righteous fury that’s building within France, because there are few films that I’d like to praise more than this one. This is as good as it gets for Coppola in regards to costuming and set design, thanks in part to the full cooperation of Versailles. Within this state of total opulence, she and cinematographer Lance Acord put together one stunning tableau after another, each worthy of the same kind of artistic immortalization that hangs on the Versailles walls. Dunst is incredibly magnetic and Schwartzman is fully dedicated to making Louis as awkward and pathetic as the real Louis XVI. The extensive supporting cast feels exactly right in their comfort level with this world and their ability to fit into it, from Torn’s lecherous king to Jamie Dornan’s swagger as a dashing war hero. I want to elevate this film to the highest plain of praise because Coppola’s a major 21st century auteur and this could credibly be at the top of her filmography.
Ultimately, I just know too much about this period of history to turn that part of my brain off. Setting aside the details that the film weirdly gets wrong, like the number of children she had and when they died or the much more dramatic circumstances of the uprising depicted late in the film, it’s simply impossible for me to be onboard with the film’s premise. There is a lay reading of Marie Antoinette that finds sympathy for her as an individual, but the long process that will lead to her ignominious end removes her individuality and makes her body into a collection of political power, in the same way everyone in the court is not a person but a manifestation of the state. Therefore, ripping her to shreds, as the participants in the uprising would surely have done if they caught her at Versailles, would not have been grisly murder as much as it would have been political rebellion on the part of people who have no other recourse to power. This is the world that the French monarchy created on purpose, and its fracturing is not cause for concern but praise. No amount of filmmaking can overpower that essential truth. B
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