'Marie Antoinette': Lost in revolution
The film starts with the teenaged Austrian princess arriving at the French border, in 1770, as the prospective bride of Louis, the Dauphin of France (Jason Schwartzman). She enters a tented pavilion, pitched in autumnal woods; it might as well be made from candy canes and gingerbread. It even has a resident witch, the Comtesse de Noailles (Judy Davis). After years at the French court, the Comtesse is about as welcoming as a frozen hedgehog.
Marie finds the existence of the rich and royal, in pre-Revolutionary France, to be starched beyond all tolerance; over time, she exerts a softening, not to say trivialising, influence, and that, in turn, is one of the factors that hasten the Revolution's rush.
For all latest news, follow The Daily Star's Google News channel. Marie's sole duty is to provide the Dauphin with a male heir, a task made more urgent when he ascends the throne. The Dauphin, however, is a tidy dullard whose only pleasure is the study of locks and keys. One night in Paris, the Queen, as she now is, attends a masked ball. There, at last, she meets Count Fersen (Jamie Dornan), a leering Swede, and, if this film is to be believed, father to the sovereign bloodline of France.
But is this film to be believed? Coppola films Versailles with a flat acceptance, quickening at times into eager montage. The one, transfixing virtue of Marie Antoinette is its unembarrassed devotion to the superficial.
The movie somehow contends that the Queen was, with her gang of cronies and her witless overspends, the Paris Hilton of the late eighteenth century. The movie's approach to everything is like the look on Kirsten Dunst's face: a beautiful blankness, forever on the brink of drifting, with a smile, into sleep.