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Coppola keeps her focus firmly on the young queen, resisting the urge to contrast the opulence of life at Versailles with the crippling poverty in which the average commoner lived during the reign of Louis XVI. This has the effect of keeping the viewer myopically involved with the story Coppola wants to tell, and that's a deliberate choice on the part of the filmmaker. Marie Antoinette lived her life in a bubble, in complete isolation from the poverty in which her subjects were deeply mired. They were struggling to survive amidst a crippled economy; Marie Antoinette was struggling to survive the boredom of the royal court.

The film opens with the young Marie Antoinette (Kirsten Dunst), just 14, having just been bargained off to a marriage with the Louis, the teenage grandson of the King of France, in a marriage treaty between France and Austria. She was the youngest daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor Francis I and the many-titled Maria Theresa, one of the most powerful rulers in Central Europe at that time.

Coppola shows us the Austrian teenager, known as Maria Antonia, waking on her last day in Austria. She is carefully dressed, looking more than a little like Disney's Alice in Wonderland, with her straight, blond hair pulled back from her face. Like Paris Hilton, that famous modern blonde who carries her small accessory dog everywhere she goes, Maria Antonia tightly clutches a small dog close to her chest.

The girl tearfully tells her mother goodbye, then gets in the carriage for the long trip to her new home. It's worth noting that the young Maria Antonia bears herself with a poise and comportment one would be hard-pressed to find in teens today. She knows her destiny and she doesn't fight against it -- perhaps because she accepts and even welcomes it, perhaps because she knows there's no point.

The handing off from Maria Antonia's Austria escort to the French escort that will deliver her to Versailles takes place in an elaborate ceremony in a tent placed with painstaking accuracy on the border between the two countries. Maria Antonia enters the tent on the Austrian side, she is stripped of every last vestige of her Austrian life -- clothes, friends, her dog ("You can have as many French dogs as you wish," the girl is told), even her name, which becomes Marie Antoinette -- and made over into a French fashion plate. She exits the tent on the French side, steps into the waiting carriage, and is whisked away to the Wonderland that is Versailles.

Coppola paints the court at Versaille in brilliant technicolor pastels. Versailles is a strange and wonderful place, and we see it through the eyes of a fourteen-year-old girl, miserably lonely for home, married, in short order, to the socially awkward and disinterested fifteen-year-old heir to the throne of France. When Marie and Louis take to their marriage bed on the eve of their wedding, they are accompanied by the entire court; everyone is eager to ensure the marriage is consummated to make it official, and that an heir be produced as quickly as possible.

Coppola imagines here how it would be to be two teenagers who find themselves in that situation -- the 14-year-old girl who must have sex with this boy she barely knows and get pregnant, and the 15-year-old boy with little interest in accomplishing this; it's a bit like a middle school dance, where the boys and girls are shoved together into a room full of people and expected to sink or swim in the murky sea of sex and romance. Would teenagers in 1770 have reacted the same way that today's teens might? Coppola shows us what it might have been like if they did.

Coppola uses minimal dialogue throughout the film; information is conveyed to us in actions and visuals more than words, and the emotional tone for the scenes is set, in large part, by overheard bits of whispered gossip along the corridors of the palace. Perhaps because we are seeing Versailles through the eyes of a teenager, it feels very much like a high school, with all the various court ladies vying for positions of rank and popularity, the King's courtesan in the role of the class slut, the obsession over fashion and distractions, and endless unwritten rules of social decorum to memorize. Because she is the dauphine, the other ladies are not permitted to speak to Marie until she speaks to them, which puts her in the unenviable position of having to constantly remember who ranks above whom when she needs a hankie to blow her nose.

The film, overall, plays rather like a music-video version of the story of Marie Antoinette. Coppola has an artistic eye, and there are some beautifully shot scenes in this film. The music is modern -- there's a fantastic scene at a masked ball that blends 18th century dancing with a fast, contemporary song. The tone is modern, especially in the dialogue between Marie and her intimate friends, and there's even a shot of a Converse sneaker in one of the scenes.

This might seem a bit disconcerting, but the overall effect works quite well; by blending the tale of one of the world's most infamous celebreties with a modern tone and feel, Coppola holds a mirror up the our own society and values: The excess, the utter lack of awareness of people who don't have all the trappings and comforts of wealth -- or at least today's middle class -- the boredom that leads to marking time with parties, rich food and gambling.

Coppola brilliantly paints a reflection of our own society by using Marie Antoinette to show us ourselves: The opulence, the waste, the revolutions that result when those in power ignore those they are supposed to serve.

We may not like what we see there, but the way in which she reveals it to us is visually stunning and compelling, and the lessons to be learned from the reign of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette have never been more timely.

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originally posted: 10/20/06 22:00:48
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