Lux. Charlotte. And now Marie Antoinette. With her latest film, Sofia Coppola adds the French queen to her list of isolated, female protagonists who grow from passivity and ambivalance to self reliance and determination. Hitting many of the same emotional -- and visual -- notes as
The Virgin Suicides and
Lost in Translation before it,
Marie Antoinette fuses its subject's life with a contemporary aesthetic which is surprisingly effective. The film is willfully shallow in the finest, McLuhanesque way; it is no accident that we come to empathize with the characters far more than we come to understand them. And any criticisms regarding the anachronisms of the film reflect far more poorly on the viewer than on the film. By allowing the actors to play modern, and by placing the characters in scenarios befitting their age (parties, frolics through the fields), Coppola has stripped the precedings of the pretense that befalls innumerable period films which strive to adhere too rigidly to the common conception of the eras they represent. Kirsten Dunst, who has the benefit of features which can effortlessly shift from jejune to elegant in a glance, spends the first act of the film in near silence, susceptive to her surroundings, and we are reminded that she is, in fact, a gifted actress. In this first act, Coppola uses Dunst's expressive face to set the tone of the film. It is only when Louis and Marie are crowned King and Queen -- and, more specifically, when Marie shortly thereafter begins to assert herself, acting upon seemingly every frivilous whim -- that she becomes something more than a pinball, acting and speaking for herself (sometimes at the expense of dignity and better judgment). It is when Marie becomes assertive that the film's much publicized New Wave soundtrack begins, and its judiciously adroit punctuations prove it more than the foolish fancy of a precocious director, as the film's trailers had led many to assume.
Ultimately, the film's only shortcoming is that in isolating the royal family to such an extreme, the audience gets little sense of the historical significance of the events that transpire around Marie in the film's final reel; to many, the film's final shots may seem anticlimactic. Still, even taking Marie the character at face value, as a superficial spendthrift both obsessed with and captious toward appearances, the once opulent Versaille in shambles is a devastating denouement.