"DodO iS noT dEAd"

A punk Naturalist

Friday 8 January 2010

18th century in films /1: Marie Antoinette, by Sophia Coppola (2006)

Let them eat meringues.


"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” A panorama of the 18th century in films - with a strong bias towards French history.

A fourteen-year old Austrian girl - aka Marie-Antoinette… - is stripped – quite literally - of her pas life to be plunged into the frivolous world of the French court, following after her marriage with the dauphin de France.

Who said that only classical music becomes costume films? Not Sofia Coppola for sure: her film, a portrait of the ill-fated queen of France from her arrival at Versailles to her departure from it, features music by Air or the Cure as well as Jean-Philippe Rameau. She delights in calculated anachronisms – ah! the infamous pair of Converse trainers nonchalantly lying among period shoes… Historically, there is a clear-cut bias: all is seen through the eyes of Marie-Antoinette, who appears like a victim - a flawed victim, unable to resist to temptation of a fickle life, but a victim nonetheless. The film has been criticised for hardly touching any political or topical issues, leaving aside, for example, the famous affair of the necklace, which was so damaging to the Queen’s reputation. The whole point, I would argue, is that in Versailles, nothing seems to transpire from the outside world. Marie-Antoinette never leaves her bubble, not even, of course, when she tries to leave the pressure of court life by retiring into the Petit Trianon. Despite all the liberties taken with the historical genre, Marie Antoinette is the successful, if sometimes irritating, reinterpretation of an era.

The politician and professional turncoat Talleyrand famously said that those who had not lived in the years before the Revolution have never known “la douceur de vivre" (the sweetness of life). “Love, Poetry; Music, Drama, Painting, Architecture; the court, salons, parks and gardens; gastronomy, literature, the Fine arts and sciences; everything concurred to fulfil the physical, intellectual and even moral appetites”, he said, so that the eighteenth century could properly be called “the century of indigestion.” As if on cue Sofia Coppola films piles upon piles of rosy cupcakes and rare delicacies, pink game pawns that look like sweets and gorgeous pastel costumes that could be blancmange, conveying an overwhelming impression of sensuousness, bordering on nausea. Shots after shots of food, alternating with shots of shoes, clothes and trinckets. Life at Versailles, so it seems, is a seemingly endless, and slightly distressing banquet.

The party, of course, comes to an end eventually, as an angry mob armed with torches breaks into the park of Versailles at night. The tableau is brilliantly absurd: the queen and the king are sitting on each side of a table covered with rich delicate food; the lackey is knocking his staff to announce the beginning of the meal; but all you hear is the howls of the mob outside demanding bread. No music ; only the howling. The scene which follows, when the queen goes out on her balcony, sent shivers up and down my spine. (All this proves, if it was needed, that Marie-Antoinette is a film to be seen on a cinema screen and not on television…)

The abrupt end is quite potent: Marie Antoinette and her husband, in a carriage, look at the park of Versailles for the last time. The last shot shows one of the magnificent halls of Versailles now empty, with its windows shattered. Nothing can be heard, except the fluttering of wings in a nearby room…

Marie Antoinette. A film by Sophia Coppola (2006). Starring Kirsten Dunst and Jason Schwartzmann.

2 comments:

  1. If I recall, the film starts with the song 'Natural's Not In It' from the Neo-Marxist post-punk band Gang of Four- which starts:
    ~
    The problem of leisure:
    What to do for pleasure?
    I do love a new purchase,
    a market of the senses!
    ~

    Which rather sets the tone for the rest of the film.

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  2. Hello Joey! Its really good to see you (or rather read you). Thank you very much for you comment - a neo-marcist post punk group sounds great!
    To be quite honest, I haven't seen the film in a while, and wrote from memory. what really impressed me was the amount of food consumed (or not eaten and doomed to be wasted). I guess it works quite well as a metaphor of consumerism - in French at least it does : consommation means both consumption and consumerism. Its true the film is only very partially about the 18th century. Sophia Coppola's film is I think a bit ambiguous and it is interesting/ telling that the aesthetics of the film has been shamelessly copied for a tv advert (selling what, I forgot). Im actually amazed Sophia Coppola has not sued them...

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