Cannes diary part ten: 'Marie Antoinette' review

Dave Calhoun takes a look at Sofia Coppola's third feature.

May 24 2006

Things have taken a distinct turn for the worse in Cannes over the past two days. First, there was Bruno Dumont's vague, empty 'Flandres' and then came Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's disappointing 'Babel' (see Geoff Andrew's earlier reviews).

Ennui continued to set in last night with Lucas Belvaux's 'The Right of the Weakest', a distinctly average and clumsy tale of unemployment and crime in Belgium's Liege. Then, early this morning, Sofia Coppola offered us 'Marie Antoinette', her much-anticipated, pretty but quite empty take on the last, bloated days of the French monarchy with Kirsten Dunst in the title role as Louis XVI's Viennese wife.

Coppola's film may give fashion fans and music video heads cause to celebrate, but it will leave anyone looking for a strong perspective on the life of Marie Antoinette severely disappointed. What Coppola does is throw snippets of the well-known facts - her husband's sexual immaturity, her infidelity, her acting, her love of clothes - into a celebration of costume, production design and music that's played by a cast of unlikelies, some more successfully than others.

Jason Schwartzman is fittingly fey as the sexually ineffective king; Marianne Faithfull is an oddity as Marie Antoinette's mother; Rip Torn is nicely brash as Louis XIV. Dunst puts in a breezy and sometimes seductive, if a little unchallenging, performance as Marie Antoinette herself. Coppola's decision not to worry too much about certain aspects of historical detail - accents, some behaviour - is a bold one and thankfully not awkward as she doesn't attempt to push the anachronisms too far. A modern soundtrack is Coppola's bravest move.

The film is a hermetic affair that, like its heroine, barely strays beyond the gates of Versailles or acknowledges the coming French Revolution until its final minutes. Coppola's interest in the visual side of Versailles rules the day; her camera never stops surveying the fabric of Marie Antoinette's world. She delivers a startling line-up of shoes, frocks and hipster tunes from the '70s and '80s. As a study in surface, it's quite impeccable. Soon, though, this flippancy begins to grate and it becomes more and more apparent that Coppola has failed really to grapple on any meaningful level with her subject. Dialogue trickles sparingly and unilluminatingly beneath the overwhelming spectacle. Conversation is sparse. The script is bare.

Rather than indulge the grotesquery of Versailles with an engaged eye, Coppola celebrates it without showing any care for characters, relationships or the wider context of French history. Her Versailles is an array of caricatures; her Marie Antoinette is a sweet, well-meaning aristocrat, a breath of fresh air for Coppola among some of the stuffier palace shirts.

The real problem is that Coppola clearly loves Marie Antoinette and her world of parties and beautiful people. She's not interested in looking beyond the walls of the palace, in considering this queen in any critical depth. Ultimately, considering Coppola's attempt to shoe-horn the French revolution into the film's last ten minutes, her disengagement is more than lazy; it's a little offensive. It may be hip, but it ain't history.

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