Kirsten Dunst, who worked with Coppola on 1999’s The Virgin Suicides, understands exactly what the director wanted with this role. Her Antoinette is more or less what the queen was: a young, spoiled royal confusedly trying to make the most of what little part of her life she actually had control over. Her unwitting immersion into the culture of Versailles and sudden marriage to the hapless Dauphin Louis XVI (endearingly portrayed by Rushmore’s Jason Schwartzman) would drown most teenagers. And while she is not portrayed as faultless (she had affinities for gambling, champagne and other excesses), Antoinette the person is treated with a tender and complex empathy that shows her to be much more like us than some distant, beheaded queen. And ultimately, this is the film’s greatest triumph.
Artistically, Antoinette is the most beautiful film of the year. The cinematography by Lance Acord is soft, fuzzy and organic, echoing the look of another film he shot and Coppola directed, 2003’s Lost in Translation. The locations certainly can’t be beat: the film had an all access pass to Versailles, one of France’s most well preserved royal gems. The lavish production design brings us back to an era of extreme opulence and vanity, with a beautiful color palette of pastels and sorbets. But the real smorgasbord of eye-candy has to be the costumes and makeup. Kirsten Dunst and her court parade around in designer shoes and 18th century couture, with mile-high powdered wigs and hot pink rouge adding to the over-the-top package.
The music in the film is also exquisite. Period opera, harpsichord and string etudes blend masterfully with 80s and 90s pop rock, thanks to the talented music direction of Brian Reitzell. The Cure, The Strokes, New Order, Gang of Four and others provide anachronistic soundtracks that amp up the film’s already hyper-stylized party motifs. The music evokes the same wistful, fluorescent vibes as in Translation, with many of the same bands (Phoenix, Air, Squarepusher) appearing in both films.
For all of its irreverence, Antoinette strikes me as one of the most resonant historical dramas I’ve seen. Why? Because Coppola makes connections—something many historians don’t even do—with the past and modern life. The experience of Marie Antoinette in this film in many ways parallels the modern celebrity female’s life: tabloids, high profile romantic exploits, opulent parties, insider gossip, purse-size dogs, etc. Even the “post-baby spiritual awakening” phenomenon is referenced. After giving birth to the first royal daughter, Antoinette lets her hair down (vis-à-vis Gwyneth Paltrow) and builds her own little pastoral village “retreat” at Versailles, complete with a theater, goats, lambs and workers with hoes. She takes to reading Rousseau and getting spiritually centered while frolicking in the flowery fields with daughter Maria Theresa.
Of course, all of this “getting real and escaping from the excesses of the court” is done within the confines of Versailles’ gates. There is absolutely no connection to the commoners and the goings-on of France, apart from a few mentions of working charity money into the increasingly tight budget. We only see peasants briefly as part of a shadowy, torch-bearing mob near the end of the film. But this disconnect, appalling though it may be and doubtless the cause of Marie’s denouement at the guillotine, is not Coppola’s focus of critique.
If there is a focus of critique it is probably toward the “system” which inhibits us from living outside the sphere in which circumstance and birth have confined us. Antoinette cannot help that she was selected to be the symbol of a Franco-Austrian alliance; nor can she be faulted for being born into an aristocratic bubble of overwhelming opulence. She was just a teen girl, interested in having fun, friends, boys and shopping. Matters of state and foreign policy were never of interest to her, and Coppola seems to take this as partial justification for Antoinette’s negligence.
When seen in the context of Coppola’s other two films, Antoinette has themes that are deeper than historical “revisionism” or class critique. The protagonists in all three films are teenage girls searching for an identity in worlds of burdensome expectations where most decisions are already made for them. The films are about young girls who grow up fast, lose their innocence and pine for those brief moments of joy and freedom that come along occasionally in lives that are largely out of their hands.
Indeed, Coppola is a master of capturing these “brief moments of joy and freedom” on film. There are plenty of these in Antoinette—when the queen escapes to a masked ball in Paris or watches the sunrise at Versailles with friends after a wildly extravagant birthday party—but they are always accompanied with a melancholy air; the wispy weight of impermanence. Every party has a morning after, and Coppola is all about the morning after (who can forget the images of dawn in both the football field scene in Suicides and the final Jesus and Mary Chain montage over a Tokyo sunrise in Translation?).
Coppola’s films recognize that the energy of life is that it’s never more than a few steps away from death. Antoinette is full of vitality but also mortality. Throughout the film we witness the deaths of the elder Louis XV, as well as Marie’s mother and her very own son. And yet the pulse of the film is made ever more alive by these morbid motifs. That we know the bloody fates of Marie and Louis only intensifies the feeling of temporality that dominates the film, which rightly chooses to not portray the tragic final events in the royal family’s demise. Instead the film ends with the family fleeing Versailles as mobs are heard roaring in the distance, The final shots are of the beautiful, barren, soon-to-be desecrated palace sitting silent in the early morning sun—yet another morning after an all-too-short night of bliss.
