Pretty enough to make you blush and vacant enough to win Miss World, one can’t help but feel cheated by Ms. Coppola’s third directorial outing. If Lost In Translation traded in the same cool sensuality as Barry Lyndon, Marie Antoinette is the morning after comedown.
Based loosely on Antonia Fraser’s sympathetic revisionist biography, Coppola and muse Kirsten Dunst conspire to produce a lovely, giggly, girlie portrait of a poor little rich girl in a luxurious gilded cage. Jealous ladies of the court appear as high-school Heathers whispering insults from behind their fans, but Dunst’s Marie-Antoinette never descends to engage with her detractors. That would be far too vivacious for this film. Instead, the constitutional crisis provoked by an impotent husband (Schwartzman in an impressively fey turn) is rendered as sideline gossip. The death of a child is conveyed by the removal of a portrait. Another child is completely exorcised from history. The revolution, meanwhile, is glossed over. Only a single scene depicting silhouetted pitchforks indicates that something is rotten in the state of France.
Such distance from reality would be forgivable if it served some purpose, but Ms. Coppola doesn’t seem to be going anywhere with this. The action is so muted, so doped up, that even Rip Torn’s Louis XV is sedate. The Virgin Suicides seems like Crank by comparison.
As the trailer suggests, watching Kirsten Dunst eat cake and listening to a wholly anachronistic soundtrack of Bow Wow Wow and New Order songs is not unpleasant, but like the lowest order of Rob Schneider flick, if you’ve seen the promo, you’ve seen it all.
Happily, Coppola still manages to impress with her uncanny knack for composition, never better than here, wandering through the palatial glory of Versailles. The sheer sumptuous spectacle of it all is infectious, like watching an excited little girl find a trunk of princess dresses in her attic. But too frequently, it feels like a party to which we’re not invited. Blanched of all dramatic content, this is Adam And The Ants’ ‘Prince Charming’ video stretched over two hours without anything as lively as Diana Dors descending a staircase. The gorgeous aesthetic only leaves one with the same sensation as looking at a beautiful, empty vase in a museum.