Marie Antoinette

Long time, no blog.

Just saw a double feature of The Prestige and Marie Antoinette today. Don't have much to say about the former, other than it was a pretty entertaining way to spend a couple of hours. But I've been reading reviews and thinking about Sophia Coppola's Marie Antoinette for the rest of the evening after getting home, and since I didn't feel like any of them got it right (right=my opinion), I decided to jot down a few thoughts about it while they're fresh in my mind.

Most of the reviews talk about Marie being shallow and materialistic, and some take the film to task for its use of a contemporary soundtrack or for failing to properly explicate the political circumstances that led to the revolution that led to Marie and Louis's executions. But I think all of these miss the point. I view the movie as something of a feminist statement on how Marie, upon become Dauphine of France, was reduced by the social forces around her from a human being to nothing but a symbol: for the royals, she was a symbol of France's "friendship" with Austria, and a symbol of the future of the royal line; for the revolutionaries, she was a symbol of the decadence of the royals. As a person, she was useful for nothing more than her ability to produce an heir to the throne--which she wasn't even able to do for many years, through no fault of her own.

She starts the film seeming to be something of a "normal" teen, but after being (literally) stripped of her past, she's thrust into the strange and constricting world of Versailles. She has everything anyone could ever want--on the surface. But she has no freedom, and no self-determination. I think the movie shows that to the extent she becomes the shallow, materialistic Antoinette of history, it's as a quite human reaction to the stifling life she leads in service to the social order. It's a sort of rebellion, the only kind she is able to muster. She takes refuge in the shoes and clothes and food, and eventually in a brief affair, because she has nothing else of any meaning or consquence--because she's not allowed to have anything like that in her life. After all, why would a symbol need anything more?

As for the contemporary soundtrack, and lack of the revolutionaries' points of view, I think both of these are related to the film's focus on Marie's subjective experience. The music is meant to be one signpost to a contemporary audience toward what it would FEEL like to be in her shoes. And the movie depicts her as being quite insulated from the public, so it stands to reason that we wouldn't learn much about them in this film, either.

I did think the last 20 minutes or so dealt rather too abruptly with the Revolution, and didn't really explain why Marie would choose to stand by Louis when the peasants storm Versailles, rather than fleeing, as she is advised to do. But a lot of time is meant to pass in this last part of the film, and while I suppose the idea is that she has learned and grown and taken more responsibility, it's not made very clear how or why any of these things have occurred. I'm hesitant to say this last part is handled too quickly in what is, to be sure, a rather slow, long, and at times languorous film, but it does seem to me to falter a little here.

But this is a minor complaint. The film as a whole is really pretty great. I think the tepid reception it's received has more to do with the critics' expectations of what it "should" be than what it is.