Marie Antoinette (2006)

This soundtrack album is composed in a juggling style beginning with a few more instruments including Vivaldis concerto in G, works from Scarlatti and Rameau, Bow Wow Wows I Want Candy, and a new orchestral arrangement of Siouxsie of the Banshee’s Hong Kong Garden, which was suitable for a masked ball in Paris of the 18th century, and Adam and the Ants kings of the wild frontier, a costume video from the 80’s which the film is said to be blur. It is to the Vivaldi hopeful sound that the France King Marie Antoinette matures in the arms of a favorite at court while cheering and wetting her pants on seeing how the director has paired the Indian music harmony in.

Musical anachronisms possess a mocking twist so Jonathan Safran can calm the revolutionary movement gently, his intermittent invention and provocation still receive due respect but is Pannekoek that allows the homage to stand out most visually in Sofia Coppola’s setting.

Once more she has fed us with the sob of a poor little rich girl. Lost in Translation was about how a bright and beautiful young lady who found herself in a loveless marriage was disoriented in a foreign land. Marie Antoinette is about… well the same thing. Dunst is cast as Marie, an Austrian girl who is brought to France to marry the young Dauphin Louis-Auguste in hopes of strengthening Austria and France relations, once again Schwartzman can accurately reflect an appropriate facial expression to his character.

If there’s ever anyone who would play the role of a young heroine, that person would be Dunst a smart easily influenced young girl who impresses everyone with her charming sense of style and manners and prefers to disagree which she limits herself to a questioning smile and an ornate raise of eyebrows. She’s new to Versailles High and is uncomfortable with the social circles, so much so that she nearly shouts “Hello?!” With Maria, her only apparent friend, slowly becoming her confidant Captain Louis XV, voiced by Rip Torn, their friendship blossoming makes Louis and Maria feel as if they appeared straight out of a Bill Murray movie but Torn with Argento appearing as the role of Mistress Madame du Barry, feelings begin to be realized. Unlike other members of the court such as sycophants, gerontologists, and beggars who tend to the King of England, she starts feeling humiliated. She once ranted about how she was treated like an equal: I mean, no one here is a lady! Velma, hailing from Chicago, used to say this: “Nobody here has manners!”.

Dunst does a stellar job at portraying how unfair the court is to the queen, especially in the end where we see the court make her exit from Versailles, even when we see the slightest warning of a tumbril.

It’s a biopic but it’s as if the closing scene was cut out to prevent it from being problematic, it does feature Marie eating a disproportionate amount of cake, this does not paint the best image of her, but she is seen rebutting the claim of her encouraging the villagers to eat the cake. The movie, when first released at the Cannes festival, was subjected to heavy criticism, especially from the French directors who, most probably, been insulted by the American director trying to absolve the queen of historical unpleasantness which led to the formation of the republic. Or perhaps they were annoyed by the obvious absence of the French acting aristocracy from the cast. (The one French actor I spotted was the excellent Mathieu Amalric, who had to make do with a couple of lines as a lecherous nobleman.)

There is certainly extravagance in it, however, in the opening segments, where Marie is traversing from her country, which has been put up in a diplomatic kind of quarantine, and moved through a tent, a royal one that is placed in the Franco Austrian border, and later on lands in Versailles. These specific scenes had a close to mute sound, assisting in illustrating the feeling of confusion and distress.

The magnificence of the choreography of the court with the mask-like faces and the height-adding wigs is wonderfully controlled and paced. It would take a considerable amount of time to realize that not a single word of dialogue had been uttered throughout the film. Coppola makes it look effortless.

The queen held great ambition to provide an heir for France and struggled with depression until she managed to strut around with a gorgeous Swedish officer. It’s easy to tell that Marie has no political ambitions, and fair enough for the time being since she’s young and not entirely stupid. On the flip side, the queen has no sense of completeness either. How does she feel now about betraying her husband? Or a lover she didn’t care to keep? Or the court that allows such incidents? How does she feel now about her country that she is under threat of being hurt? She gives this impression of unresponsiveness wherein her limbs have gotten disconnected from her body.

Once more, this may have been the case: the queen was told of the outside world by different messengers bowing before her and the news concerning the Bastille would have served as an ironic counterpoint to her little fantasies of a milkmaid at Le Petit Trianon, but this irony is left unemphasised in Coppola’s film. Nonetheless, they look rather naive.

But still, however mannered this film is, the director carries off with some poise her decision to end on nothing other than a note of foreboding and exile, and there is an aesthetic closure with sufficient persuasiveness to Marie’s last ride in the carriage from her stained Eden ‘I’m sorry you see me this way,’ she looks at us sadly. Louis had declaimed plaintively on the news of his father’s death, This is not a time for youth to reign. On the other hand, the movie has plenty of Cadences and Ode.

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