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MARIE ANTOINETTE Send This Review to a Friend
Bring on the guillotine. Writer-director Sophia Coppola’s pretty but empty-headed “Marie Antoinette,” highlighted by the 2006 New York Film Festival, depicts the Queen of France at the time of the French revolution as having been a young Austrian girl given over to a political marriage but with little preparation for what was in store. So far so good.
Kirsten Dunst is cute in the role, but Coppola’s effort to show Marie Antoinette as just a good time queen without much going on in her brain except enjoying the elaborate clothes, the pastries and the high living works for only a while. Vacuity can become boring, as does the film despite all of its eye-popping visuals. However, somewhat interesting is the years it take for King Louis (Jason Schwartzman) to get going in the sack.
The film makes a point of Marie denying that she would ever have said anything as stupid as “Let them eat cake.” But by the time she exhibits some strength in facing the violent upheaval—we never get to the guillotine--the shallowness that has marked the film has created no basis for anything serious. (The documentary “Marie Antoinette” shown on PBS was far more interesting and informative.)
What helps do in the film is the pop score that Coppola has chosen to use, apparently in an effort to gain some contemporary relevance to current mindless behavior. It only seems entirely misplaced, given the attention to period detail that is the film’s strongest achievement. A Columbia Pictures release.
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