Marie-Antoinette

[rebness]

 The Scissor Sisters concert was excellent. Met Ana Matronic and Jake and... the other guys. Pics and review coming soon. But first! French versions of Hamlet!

So, I quite enjoyed Marie-Antoinette. I had to try not to take it too seriously (because, really, there were too many inconsistencies to list) and, you know... the very best thing about it was being able to see cold Versailles brought to life with beautiful camerawork, and to me, that was worth the admission price alone.

Coppola always seems to use dreamy. soft light in her films, and the magic of the sunrise that the courtiers watch over Versailles one morning is brought lovingly to life. I remember reading about that morning in Fraser's biography (on which the film is based) and trying to understand why Marie-Antoinette risked criticism to stay up and watch it (and she did. Pr0nographic pamphlets sprung up in Paris afterwards, but then, she couldn't sneeze without it being described as a vulgar orgy by citizens determined to hate her), but the film made it easy to understand.

Marie-Antoinette seemed to find her only escape from the staid world of Versailles to be nature and a rather skewed version of pastoral innocence - I thought the eggs being wiped clean before she picked them up at her 'farm' in the Petit Trianon to be a neat touch - and only Coppola, who delineated Eugenides' The Virgin Suicides in her excellent film adaptation, could really capture something like that with such empathy. I liked that this film had a female director, because it's the first time I've seen such a reviled figure treated with such a sense of humanity.

There are other neat Coppola touches. I also liked that Louis XV's mistress, the du Barry, was rendered with a little sympathy, but I hated the line where she quips 'Nobody respects me!" in a surly voice remiscent of a cross between a Sopranos extra and Velma from Chicago. Sacre-friggin'-bleu.

Too, the aunts really, really grated on me. They were so cartoonish and annoying. I especially hated the one with the Moaning Myrtle voice. The aunts apparently did use Marie-Antoinette as an ally at court, but so what? They also did provide her with company and although Mercy warned her not to be overly friendly with them, they also had some good points. To me, they were just 18th century versions of the Plastics from Mean Girls. Urgh.

There were some great performances, though. Kirsten Dunst was fair as Marie-Antoinette. I didn't find her amazing, but I didn't hate her performance, either. I do, however, wish she would learn how to pronounce 'dauphin' properly. Steve Coogan was excellent as Mercy, and I loved Jason Schwarzmann's resigned, gentle Louis. He is too often portrayed as an inept clown, but he was, in the end, a loving father and had a deep, abiding affection for Marie-Antoinette. Yes, he poured too much money into the American revolution, and yes, he lacked the grace and the strength of his father and the many Louis-types who came before him, but I liked seeing him as a family figure and not just the bumbling king history remembers.

I was glad Coppola touched on the irony of the royal family's readings of Rousseau. It was reported in Fraser's biography of the queen that Rousseau's writings were revered even at the court, even if the danger in his words seemed to escape them.

Rousseau himself was against the idea of violent revolution, but while his words inspired Marie-Antoinette with dreams of a pastoral ideal, they inspired the disaffected French with the most dangerous of Romantic notions - the idea of the self, rather than the serf: Man is born free; but everywhere I look, he is in chains. This may have meant one thing to Marie-Antoinette and her gilded courtiers stuck in the traditon of Versailles, but to her angry subjects, it meant something else entirely.

This is why Rousseau rocks.

Ahem. 

I didn't know what to make of the part where Marie-Antoinette imagines her lover, the Swedish count Fersen, on the battlefield. He looked like that Jacques-Louis David painting of Napoleon. Whether this was dramatic irony, I don't know. I should also point out that the Fersen-Antoinette affair has always been rumoured and even Fraser couldn't definitively say whether or not they had it off, but *eh*. He was eye candy, and it gave us the excuse to take in the sumptuous Opera Garnier. (Anyone else realise that we saw more of the Paris Opera in those couple of scenes than we did in Phantom of the Opera with its one-staircase act?)

Another minor quibble is all the damned cakes! I've never seen so much pastry, not even in a patisserie. I'm glad the film dispels that absurd 'let them eat cake' rumour (actually spoken by a former queen), but it looks like she'll still be associated with cakes, seeing as how they seemed to have more scenes than most of the actors.

But anyway. Back to the best bit. When the revolution shows up on her doorstep (literally), the audience, like Marie Antoinette, is shocked when the cosy world of Versailles is confronted with a mob of angry, hungry Parisians baying for blood. The hairs on the back of my neck actually went up and I felt genuinely afraid of the noise and the hate. I think those closing scenes were spectacular.

But what of the rest of it? Why didn't we see the trial, the revolutionaries who had a hand in her death, the guillotine? What happened next is so compelling, and I can understand why so many people who have seen it have been disappointed at where it leaves off.

Then again, I don't know if the film would have found any benefit in showing what came after. Her life after Versailles was one of constant heartache and humiliation after that, a slow sliding into squalor that saw her, grieving for her husband and children, bleeding from what may have been ovarian cancer, refused permission to even use the toilet in private before her hands were roughly bound and she was taken in the tumbrels to her death at Place de la Revolution.

The fall of Versailles was the watershed moment, when the decadent ancient regime was finally confronted by the reality of a starving, angry city. The more I think upon it, the more I feel it was right for the film to end at that point. We, the audience, know what comes next. There is the pointless 'trial', the ritual humiliation, the guillotine. For once, a film didn't focus on that bloodthirsty ending, but on the woman herself. I think it does Marie-Antoinette credit and serves to humanise a wrongly-villainised figure. I think Coppola's film fails as biography or historical film, and certainly, I don't think it would be half as enjoyable or that it would be easy to understand it without having read up on her life* but I did appreciate its emphatic, literary heart.

*Becky's Quick What-Happened-Next Guide:

du Barry - guillotined
Princess de Lambelle - killed by a mob in Paris
Yvonne de Polignac - escaped
Fersen - torn apart by a mob in Sweden
Male Antoinette child - died in gaol
Female Antoinette child - lived, but died childless and despised the Parisians forever. (Can't really blame her.)
Revolutionaries: According to statistics I just made up, 91% of them were guillotined during the Terror 
Rousseau: Was played by David Tennant in a BBC documentary on the Romantics and was forever beloved of Becky