Marie Antoinette
Sophia Coppola's Marie Antoinette is a difficult movie to write about, because its effects are spoiled by memory. Although it is a treat to watch, it is not satisfying to think back upon. That, at least, is my first impression. I'll give the film another chance when it comes out on DVD.
The more I know about the last notable queen of France - and there weren't very any, overall - the more convinced I am that her story is tragic, or would be if I could be sure that it ever dawned on her that she might have done things a little differently. No one could have expected a playful teenager to inhabit the burdensome role that her marriage obliged her to wear, and Marie Antoinette had the added burden of being Austrian. In the days of Louis XIV, that would not have done her any harm. But French alliances had shifted since then, and the populace was accustomed to reviling Austrians as a matter of course by 1770, the year of the young Hapsburg's arrival. If the people understood anything about the revival of cordial relations with the Empire, they chalked it up to the machinations of Mme de Pompadour (now dead). That association didn't help Marie Antoinette, either.
If Marie Antoinette had taken after the last queen, her husband's grandmother, Maria Leszczyńska - a pious but not stupid woman who held on to her dignity throughout the the infidelities of Louis XV - French history might have taken a very different turn. But Marie Antoinette's character was just the opposite. She wasn't stupid, but she was prone to boredom, and not inclined to take pains (except with games). She found the liturgical character of life at Versailles oppressive, instead of empowering, as a religious woman might have done. If she settled down a bit once her children arrived, she did not rise to the demands of being Queen of France until it was too late.
All of this is hinted at in Marie Antoinette, and I would expect viewers who are already familiar with the history of France at that time to indulge the movie's wild anachronisms. When Kirsten Dunst repeatedly says "wow" about a swatch of fabric, the film is sassing you, the informed member of the audience, in a way that nicely parallels the historic queen's sassing of her courtiers. Jason Schwartzman's impersonation of Louis XVI is an extremely quiet, because enormously compressed, joke; Mr Schwartzman hangs at the point of winking at the audience throughout every line, but never yields to the impulse, and this, of all things, gives his Louis an unlikely majesty - the majesty of resisted hilarity. In any case, stickling at the film because of its screenplay's many liberties with fact and manner will probably brand you as a killjoy.
And yet the film's complete unwillingness to convey a sense of the manners of the times even as it orgiastically revels in the period's decorative luxuriousness is problematic, at least for me. Michael Smith has argued, with great force, that Marie Antoinette is not really about Marie Antoinette. What gets in the way of my finding solution in this line of thinking is the fact that the film is so totally about Marie Antoinette's stuff. It is also not unaware that, for this particular woman, a preoccupation with stuff turned out to be life-threatening - even if she did go with the small trees. What's missing is not so much the historical reality of Marie Antoinette's life as the very physical ballet of courtly life that would animate the clothes as they were meant to be worn. The queen was notorious for her pursuit of carefree ways, but her starting point was considerably more restrained than Ms Dunst's somewhat abandoned American artlessness.
In the end, then, after the screen went dark and the opulence, both that of the château and that of Ms Coppola's filmmaking, vanished without a trace, it became hard for me to resist the impression that Marie Antoinette had been enacted by gloriously costumed but randomly chosen crash dummies. It is, as I say, a treat to watch, and sometimes very funny. Quite frequently, it exhibits the exuberance of high school on an unlimited budget. Its disregard for verisimilitude is archly transgressive. I agree with Michael Smith that Marie Antoinette wants us to think about things. In the end, I can praise it as a fantasia on historical themes. But I think that I'll always be somewhat impatient with its lack of life-giving self-discipline.
Comments
I think the analogy of the crash dummies says it all. That having been said, I agree with what you have said about the sumptuousness, and the thorough enjoyment of the fabric of the film. It slips through the fingers, but not before imparting a certain tactile frisson. What about the music? A patchwork of notes pieced together from different eras onto the same quilt, no?
Posted by: Nom de plume | November 4, 2006 08:59 PM
I must agree with you. I enjoyed the film for its visual beauty; bringing, if imperfectly and even for only brief and disjointed moments, the sense of what those gorgeous rooms and gardens looked like when inhabited by properly attired courtiers - for whom the settings were consciously designed. Louis XIV may have kept his court under thumb politically, but he knew how to show them off to dramatic effect, overawing the rest of Europe in an age when perception was all.
Ms. Dunst is pretty, and looked very much like the Marie Antionette depicted in pastels and miniatures of her early childhood. She did not come up to the look of the Queen in later years however. As to the treatment of the character of Marie Antoinette, I was, at the time of first viewing the film, of two minds. Silly and anachronistic, yes. Footloose with true court etiquette and manners, absolutely. Yet, the film did give the otherwise unknowledgeable viewer an entree into her life heretofore totally misunderstood by the layman, not least due to willful misrepresentation of her life and character through the years by historians (and self-serving politicians) as well as the esoteric nature of the subject of 18th century court life. Even at the time, the courtiers of Versailes referred to it as "ce pays ici" noting that Versailes and its society had become an alien country within France.
Yes, the fim's "Valley Girl" coterie of the Queen's friends seems improbable, yet it is not too far off from a story of the utterably spoiled young Mesdames, daughters of Louis XV, whose errant pets one day caused a small riot in the Hall of Mirrors during the reception of a very dignified cardinal and his considerable retinue; frightened pets and hapless princesses shrieking and running through his Eminence's dignity, silks and fur flying while some of the frightened animals did what frightened animals will do; Versailles was not always stultifyingly dignified nor all its inhabitants up to their roles. It was for one of these same princesses that we owe Louis XV's destruction of the incomparable "Escalier des Ambassadeurs", which was gutted to provide his daughter with an apartment at home, and leaving Versailles' State Aparments without a proper entrance. She would better have been packed off to a convent for proper instruction in her role as a marriage prize herself on the European chessboard of princesses and politics.
In fact, the devil-may-care attitude in the movie does point out, if in a bit of an outre manner, the fact that those on top had little need to impress others with their dignity as did "climbers". Louis XV's queen needed to preserve her dignity precisely because it was being assailed by her husband's notorious amours.
All this having been said, the true point is that Marie Antoinette, tragically, assumed to herself the role normally inhabited by a French King's mistress, that of being the country's mondaine. Queens of France may be many things, but historically, they were not meant to be fashion plates and the leaders of social experiment. The fact that Marie Antionette turned to this role through a combination of youth, natural high spirits and little education in the understanding of her role as Queen, as well as the comic-tragic effects of her early marriage due to her husband's avoidance of HIS prime duty, (due to painful erections; the movie never explains that a circumcision for His Most Christian Majesty was what ultimately, if too late for his wife's public reputation and inner psyche, solved the problem) is what labels her life a tragedy.
Finally, the film has achieved two things of merit: brought a much maligned figure back to us for honest re-evaluation and secondly, touched off a minor industry, a portion of the proceeds from which the great Chateau of Versailles will benefit so that "ce pays ici" can be further restored to a glory greatly diminished over the last two centuries. For a palace which heralded the glory of French craftsmanship and secured to the French economy (to say nothing of the French ego) the pre-eminence in those industries of adornment, both architectural and personal, this is fitting; Marie Antoinette has finally fulfilled her duty to France.
Posted by: LXIV | November 5, 2006 12:11 PM