Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette: The Noisy Journal of a Dying World

Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette moves like the sea; Dresses, packs of dogs, tall grass - everything moves like the ocean and none of Marie Antoinette's characters quite understand that that terrible feeling they are having is drowning.

As a film, Marie Antoinette is rather flawed, especially if you believe movies should involve plots, subplots and a series of acts leading to a neat conclusion like a play. Marie Antoinette is entirely internally consistent to its vision, however, and the feeling it leaves you with is both astounding and hungry. Whether you love or hate Marie Antoinette, you'll find yourself wanting more. I marveled, so many times while watching it, how Marie Antoinette taps into that feeling of experiencing the world as if no one ever has in quite the same way with quite the same intensity (much like the paper bag moment in American Beauty).

Marie Antoinette contains so many moments of drunken friends pushing past what Anne Rice named "The Golden Moment" and you do feel for them - as it takes more and more to have less and less fun and comment wittily on it Coppola's vision of Versailles. There's a moment, at a costume ball Marie Antoinette and her friends have snuck off to, with dancers whirling to Siouxsie and the Banshee's Hong Kong Garden that manages to evoke the thrill and fantasy that nightlife so rarely lives up to.

Sofia Coppola has a knack both here in Marie Antoinette and in her other films for portraying loneliness amongst crowds and splendor and loss as delineated by her characters' broad, if not expansive, imaginations. There are moments in Marie Antoinette where you know the characters are watching themselves, where they are thinking "and all nights should be as this night" when even that night is not truly as they would wish it.

One could easily be forgiven (especially if one is the same age as Coppola and recognizes the modern music of the film as being from high school) for thinking of prom. There were multiple moments in Marie Antoinette where I burst into tears, a given shot was so perfectly paired with a bit of music.

I also must take a moment to give kudos to the sound editors and mixers of Marie Antoinette. The ambient sound on the film is astounding and is perhaps the most significant factor in creating the feeling of tension that is the insular world of the French court.

I must say that I saw this film with one of the angriest audiences I have ever experienced., both the subject and style and Marie Antoinette incensing people - to yell at the screen and other strangers in the theatre. We were the rioters, but Marie Antoinette and Louis were somehow besides the point.

Marie Antoinette is not the story of the French Revolution. Nor is it any sort of cautionary or moral tale or even a grand feminist statement. Merely, Marie Antoinette is the noisy, disjointed journal of a dying world and those carried down by its weight. It is not about guilt or innocence, morals or compassion, merely the notion that the end of all things, of any things, is always sad.

I thought Marie Antoinette was lovely, but perhaps you have to have a penchant for the cruelties of restriction, the finer points of protocol and the idea that you can will the night longer and the morning clearer, no matter how many times the very attempt of such an act has failed you.