a still of plated deserts from MARIE ANTOINETTE. Sofia Coppola invents instagram
Sofia Coppola’s film about France’s final queen Marie Antoinette bloomed with controversy before the film even went into production. Rumours that proved to be true circulated in online film spaces that she was going to take an anarchic anachronistic approach to the period costume-drama. Her Marie Antoinette would be a deconstruction of period pieces and the mannered style therein—and cast the gluttonous queen in the guise of her career-long examination of the teenage girl as an outsider figure whose behaviour could be explained through Coppola’s tendency to self-identify with the aesthetic surfaces and caged emotions of these characters. It became more obvious that this would not be a studied and faithful adaptation when news broke that she was scripting from Antonia Fraser’s newly revisionist biography of Marie Antoinette as her source material, instead of the more detailed and factual accounts of the monarch from Stefan Zweig’s analytic biography. To make matters more profane, Coppola shot her fantasia of the beheaded glamour queen at her former kingdom—the Palace of Versailles—and she intended to debut her film at Cannes for a French audience.
She seemed to be courting controversy, and scandal followed the film after the divisive premiere. The film was booed, which is not exceptional for Cannes, but some in the French critical establishment took the film to task for the way it presented the facts of its revisionist history. Agnès Poirier, the critic at the French Newspaper Libération, wrote, “The film is shocking because it is empty, devoid of a point of view, because the person who has made it has no curiosity for the woman she is portraying and the time that her tragic life is set in. The film director seems as unconcerned by her subject as Marie-Antoinette was indifferent to the plight of her people and the world she lived in.”. Poirier’s frustrations were somewhat tempered by his admiration of the colorful mise-en-scene, and it must be said that not everyone in the French intelligentsia were critical of Coppola’s vision; Jean-Michel Frodon, the editor-in-chief at Cahiers du Cinema found much to admire about Coppola’s film and made an argument for the film with an auteurist take on the material.
Marie Antoinette was always going to garner a sharply critical response within France, because the nature of Antoinette’s monarchy, and the French revolution that followed, is too explosive for a tepid response. Indifference might have been the worst of all possible fates: in Coppola’s own words, “it would have been worse if they hadn’t reacted at all.”. It is true that Coppola’s Marie Antoinette presents itself as a hollow endeavor, but its cloistered world of ritual, feminine finery, and glamour at the expense of the noble peasant life of blood and dirt and responsibility and anguish is entirely the point. Marie Antoinette is told in a way that is extremely pleasurable in its surfaces of beauty, and in its elaborate and meticulous and jaw-dropping set-design, but there is criticism within the form itself. Alongside those aspirational qualities that Coppola self-identifies with as a daughter of filmmaking royalty, there is also condemnation and interrogation. Marie Antoinette asks viewers what is at stake when a white woman aspires to this type of lifestyle, and Coppola’s film wonders if there is something rotten when femininity is linked to such exhibitionist displays. However, the film’s brilliance lay in how there is still a seductive pull, and a longing for majesty within her images that persists, even with that critical valve of tension and criticism bubbling underneath the elaborate wigs, and the decadent costumes. With Marie Antoinette, Sofia Coppola has her cake and eats it too.
I wrote about Sofia Coppola's MARIE ATOINETTE for my reader's choice series. I dove into how the superficial qualities are actually the entire point of the endeavor and how it's the most complicated film she's ever made. Really proud of how this one turned out.
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