Marie Antoinette Movie Review: A Dreamy Confection

Cake is the perfect metaphor for this superficial confection. Sofia Coppola transforms Antonia Fraser's book about the ill-fated Archduchess of Austria, and later Queen of France, into a dreamy big screen confection in Marie Antoinette.

Marie Antoinette is literally a very pretty picture. However, it could have been so much more. It is meant like a luxurious feast, but no matter how sumptuous it may be, it should have something more than just the cakes. It's like eating dessert first and never getting around the main course. Imagine what this attractive but empty shell of a film might have been with something else in it...

Marked as one of the most misunderstood woman in history, Marie Antoinette is an ambitious tapestry of fantasy within realism. A visually splendid cinematic poem, the film is partly a speculation of Marie Antoinette's frame of mind, partly a lavishly intricate material indulgence, and partly an advocacy for some feminist convictions. Indeed, it is not the usual anticipated period piece. Instead, it is a cinematic offer that is all about the moods: artfully capturing the anxieties inherent on being a young, confused royalty far from home and exposed to a foreigner's life of grandeur.

Despite its dazed and sumptuous production design and cinematography, the film looks too superficial. It is fluffy and sweet in the outside but quite shallow and lacking point in the inside. And though Coppola's aesthetic instincts remain strong, this film, like the lavishly fashion-conscious Marie Antoinette, cannot survive on style alone. This passionately sympathetic dream-bio may be a complete eye candy, but the actual story gets lost at some point. For all the pretty stuff within this sugar-looking eye confection, it has actually left the audience hanging especially in the end.

Coppola may considerably have a strong attention to detail with her impressionistic style, but this movie masked by its arthouse look never really gets to the actual point. And the initial reaction of the general viewer would be: "there is something lacking in the end." There is a possibility that such may be intentional. However, it doesn't work pretty well for the film.

Marie Antoinette is not an attempt to be historically accurate down to the very last detail. With the history, culture, fashion, and etiquette seen (the use of rock music, modern dialogues, and the lack of proper accents), Coppola's utilizing of her creative license is very much apparent. However, it is inevitable to find negative reactions from some viewers who may say that the film has a somewhat condescending impression to its source material or its historical background. Nevertheless, her artistic taste for it is validating for the more alternative type of audience.

As a costume drama with invitingly rich colors, it is notable to say that Marie Antoinette breathes visual life into the big screen. People fascinated by intricate shoes and towering coiffeurs can enjoy sights of them. On a lighter note, the play on the character of Marie Antoinette (all fluffy and pink but seemingly incomplete) in this film makes her sort of like a Paris Hilton of that era of Versailles, France.

Coppola seems to have an affinity in telling stories about what it means to be a girl. She reconstructs the events leading up to the French Revolution in the point of view of Marie Antoinette. As a form of an entertaining experiment, it is a brave decision to deliver such a fresh take on a supposedly typical biopic piece by creatively colliding eras to assert how the rich youth of long ago may not be much different from those of today.

Marie Antoinette transports the viewers to a place they've never been, make them feel a sensation that's familiar, and yet leaves them different from the time period. Marie Antoinette's life is explored from a completely different angle, expressing more of her possible human side than what history has chronicled. The movie humanizes a woman whose life has been appropriated (or misappropriated) by history. With this approach, Marie Antoinette becomes human and sympathetic, and lets 18th-century history somehow rock out into modern times. However, from the last image showing the royal family evacuating the besieged Versailles and heading to Paris (no imprisonment in the Conciergerie nor guillotine in this retelling), the end of the film is qyite abrupt.

Though the parallelism of ending the movie where it has actually started (with Marie Antoinette in a carriage) seems a fair enough device, the lack of plot development for a cinematic treat simply results into a very loose end.

Overall, with the kind of treatment given to the film, Kirsten Dunst effectively portrays the pathos of her character as a self-absorbed woman imprisoned in a golden cage of wealth and privilege. Her natural charm carries the story. Her distinct "American-ness" and the other characters' physical and verbal modernity matched by the modern music becomes a play on style. Yet, not all people can get impressed with this kind of cinematic play.

Dunst's character makes a fair point about how to rationalize Marie Antoinette's fate. More importantly, she becomes a metaphor on how women have been suffering until now.

Overall, when you watch this eye candy confection, it is visually nice to watch; yet, very easy to forget. Too bad for its metaphors, they just simply pass by one's head, then they get trashed out right away after watching the movie.