Sofia Coppola has stated over and over again: This is not supposed to be a historical document. She never intended this to be something that came from the History Channel. So to the people who bash it for its historical innaccuracies, start looking at it as a MOVIE and less as a high school history project.
This is a movie about the girl herself - NO, not about the French Revolution. About a girl, and Coppola does a stunning job of fusing the audience into her world.
What Coppola is trying to do is document the personal life of a lonely teenage girl, completely ordinary except for the fac that she is queen. And we can see it - when Marie and her friends paw through endless shoes and dresses like today's girls at their favorite boutique, doing exactly what teens of today's society might do if suddenly thrust into a life of seemingly endless wealth - fulfill their dream of a play-house (or in Marie's case, a play-village), on a ridiculously extravagant birthday party (I mean, watch "My Super Sweet Sixteen" and see if you can honestly penalize Marie Antoinette.
We are able to comprehend her ignorance, her oblivion to the outside world, the seduction of Versailles, when all she sees her her Versailles bubble are the beautiful gowns, trimmed gardens and stately palace. (Think about how clueless and extravagant today's upper-class teens can be). And especially when she's constantly distracted and plagued by relentless, vicious gossip (again, teen girls can certainly empathize).
There's also beautiful visuals, and not just the lovely, succulent montages of seductive pink cakes and gowns-of-your-wildest-dreams. The use of light is extraordinary, as Coppola expertly and artfully maneuvers it to maintain the feeling she wants instilled in us - claustrophobia, fear, nostalgia, frivolity. The last shot, I thought was particularly beautiful, when a mixture of sunshine and shadow fall onto the sober, wistful faces of Marie and Louis as they look back at Versailles one last time.
Coppola is more of an artist than an entertainer, so if you were expecting big battles and The Patriot-type action scenes, be sadly mistaken. Coppola affectively employs everything in the movie for meaning - the little dialogue, the monotony and seeming repetition of Marie's life, etc.
If you are seeking to be entertained, go watch Spiderman. If you are seeking for a thoughtful, masterful, personal interpretation, watch Marie Antoinette.
I wrote it in quite a passion. MA was my first Sofia film and at the time, I was feeling that the movie was dreadfully misunderstood (incidentally the crying title of my review). In retrospect, I still agree with the things I said, though I wince a little at the spelling errors ("affectively") and wildly inventive phrases like "gowns-of-your-wildest-things". The hyphen has always been an enemy of mine, grammatically speaking. It's cute to look back on these things, isn't it? Off to hunt down my Eragon reviews. My friend and I spent, um, lots of time on them. They're funny, at least!
