Marie Antoinette (2006, Coppola)

Sofia Coppola's visually stunning and stylistically ambitious re-working of the period piece sub-genre daringly sympathizes with one of France's most demonized historical figures, Marie Antoinette, and presents the tumultuous period of her young royalty through her eyes. And these are eyes that widen at a pair of new shoes but turn away when presented with the news of starving peasants. By fusing the 18th-century set design with an 80's new wave soundtrack, all the cobwebs are shaken off the boring old trappings of your regular historical genre piece and the character of Marie Antoinette is brought to life with vivacity and spunk. The soundtrack also makes it easier to view Marie as just another teenage girl who wants to have fun and just happens to be ruling France. Elements of Coppola's previous works, Lost in Translation and The Virgin Suicides are evident here, in the lead character's displaced, dreamy view of the world around her. As tempers start to flare in France, placing the royal court at the forefront of hatred and slander, Marie escapes in to her garden retreat, finding solace in the presence of nature. Complaints have been lobbied at Coppola for not presenting enough of the peasant's view or the Revolution in general, but that's done quite deliberately: Marie Antoinette didn't give a damn about them. Though she has all the riches and power in the world, she's happiest when she's laying in the grass with her friends waiting for the sun to rise. Coppola once again follows her heroine through a collection of intimate scenes, all played wonderfully by Kirsten Dunst, who has never had an impressive range but shows just how great she can be when perfectly cast. Though the film opens with Marie lounging in a chair luxuriously while Gang of Four rocks out in the background, asking, "What to do/for pleasure?", the mood slowly becomes more somber as the film progresses and it ends with a brief shot of the tattered remains that Marie and Louis leave behind, a shot that perfectly sums up their ultimate downfall by the hands of the commoners they so consistently ignored. And when Marie finally says, "Let them eat cake," it's delivered with such sunny nonchalance that it's actually easy to believe her claim that she never said those words. And after hearing all the scatching, accusatory whispers that haunt the young queen wherever she goes, it's not hard to draw the conclusion that maybe Marie was just like the tabloid targets we have today: infamous, glamorous, and completely misunderstood.

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