By Nightdreamer
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Marie Antoinette, as a Sofia Coppola creation, dresses in flashy corsets, carries a mixture of naiveté and cunning, and just wanders around in a dollhouse called Versailles -- all on a punk sound stage. She is the Innocence personified, being lost in, uh, confusion and condemned in an eternal adolescence. Being the object of a nuptial trade since her early 14’s, she shares the same bed with an equally oblivious Louis XVI.
What’s the only outlet? Irrepressible shopping therapy and extramarital fooling around, according to the fitful scenario of young Ms. Coppola, which appears to claim that “all bored and disappointed wives of all eras are the same." Even if one bypasses this sociological generalization, could the above form the groundwork for a movie of great duration and even greater expectations?
Squandering half of the film's time to jump over the reef of her virginity, Marie Antoinette finally throws off her shyness and starts savoring carnal knowledge and other pleasures, becoming thus an ideal scapegoat for the rebels of the French nation. Coppola will guide Marie, holding her by hand, till the critical moments of 1789 -- but she will keep her decapitation out of our sight.
So what's the verdict? Is Marie innocent? And how does the ontological innocence engage with the historical innocence?
Sofia Coppola seems to perceive nothing more than the teenage ingenuousness in general, and likewise she directs the film as a video clip with many tableaux vivants, while on the other hand Kirsten Dunst is acting like an 18th century virgin suicide with vintage clothes.
No one asked for the still-green filmmaker to outline a decadent world on the verge of the Revolution (for a film like that one can always go back to 1981 Klimov’s Agony, which portrays pre-revolutionary Russia through the relationship between Rasputin and the Czarina). This is why Coppola should be very careful on her wallowing in the dangerous waters of history. The final scene of a ravaged room didn’t give rise to the chauvinistic French reflexes as much as to the common sense of everyone.
What was the thematic center of gravity of this film? A requiem for the assassinated innocence?
And just what was that pair of pink Converse doing in Marie’s wardrobe, anyway?
Marie Antoinette is being screened Friday (2.9), Saturday (2.10), and Sunday
(2.11) at 7 pm, in Scott Hall (43 College Ave.) on Rutgers' New
Brunswick campus as part of the New Jersey Film Festival.
ON THE WEB:
New Jersey Film Festival
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