| THE QUEEN IS DEAD : Sofia Coppola's 'Marie Antoinette' [4/10] |
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| Wednesday, 18 October 2006 | |
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Schadenfreude alert! If you were baffled by the praise heaped upon the trifling Virgin Suicides, and then disturbed by the fact that, with the decidedly so-so Lost In Translation, Ms Coppola became the first (and, shamefully, still the only) American woman ever nominated for Best Director at the Oscars, you'll have your worst suspicions confirmed by sitting through the misfire that is Marie Antoinette. A waftily amorphous, jaggedly episodic quasi-biopic of the notorious 18th-century French queen - played by Virgin lead Kirsten Dunst - it's less a movie, more an expensive excuse for Coppola to indulge her love of pretty things: a precious parade of opulent clothes, elaborate costumes, plumed headwear, palatial furniture and ornate confectionery (it's a safe bet that the bakery budget alone must have exceeded the cost of many entire independent movies.) Despite the fact that Marie Antoinette had a particularly turbulent and dramatic life, Coppola doesn't seem much interested in anything so tedious as plot: the action proceeds in fits and starts, the chronology suddenly speeding up in the final act before ending on a jarringly abrupt note as Marie leaves the royal palace of Versailles for the last time. But the film doesn't even work either as mood-piece or as psychological portrait: Coppola too often seems infected (or perhaps entranced) but the constipated stiffness and vapid decadence of Versailles - finding in it, perhaps, a gilded mirror of her own naive shallowness. We see events from free-spirit Marie's naive perspective - but what are we to make of the way the "fickle" French populace, showing up in the final reel to storm Versailles, are glimpsed only as a shadowy, vaguely sub-human mob? How does this square with the way Coppola explicitly tries to debunk the let-them-eat-cake caricature of Marie as an unfeeling, solipsistic hedonist? Is Marie heroine, villainess, or both? Is, as Antonia Fraser's book Marie Antoinette : The Journey (reportedly the basis for Coppola's script) she misunderstood - more sinned against than sinning? Coppola doesn't seem to know or much care, preferring to follow Marie and her entourage in and around her Petit Trianon retreat, the focus of some dreamy, sub-sub-Terrence-Malick bucolic reveries. But Coppola spends so much time in this manner that the picture's pacing is soon thrown all out of kilter: hence that climactic, breakneck, confusing sprint through several years of childbirth, child-death and, beyond the Faberge-bijou bubble of Versailles, cataclysmic political upheaval. Along the way there are several flashily-edited montages, percussively scored to modern pop/rock/punk tunes: there's a deliberate MTV vibe to such attention-grabbing interludes, and on a scene-by-scene basis, Marie Antoinette isn't without a certain swaggering charm and gleefully anachronistic impact (the opening titles are misleadingly economic/punchy/sly.) But the clunky dialogue - and the fact that many characters have jarring modern-American accents, and speak in incongruous modern-American rhythms and idioms - gives the whole enterprise the unfortunate air of a hideously over-budgeted school play, a fluffy frippery stretched out to two enervating hours (many scenes are 'artily' extended long after their point has been conveyed.) Dunst copes as well as can be expected given the circumstances, but you do end up feeling rather sorry for the likes of Marianne Faithfull (an imposing black-clad dowager as Marie Antoinette's mother, Austrian empress Maria Theresa), Rip Torn (looking a touch desperate as randy King Louis) and Asia Argento (gamely making the most of a notably underwritten role as Torn's trampy mistress). The presence of Steve Coogan in a key suppporting role as the French ambassador to the Austrian court, meanwhile, is especially unfortunate: Coppola doesn't seem to be aware that he's one of Britain's most skilled comic actors, and seeing him in this kind of garb sparks memories of recent turn in A Cock and Bull Story. On that picture, Michael Winterbottom and company took the standard model of the period costume-drama and cast it into something striking, bold and genuinely witty. Coppola, in comparison, comes across on this evidence as more of an opportunistic no-talent who has ridden her luck an awfully long way, but has now come a right royal cropper. Neil Young 18th October, 2006 MARIE ANTOINETTE : [4/10] : USA 2006 : Sofia COPPOLA : 123 mins (BBFC timing) seen at Empire cinema, Gate complex, Newcastle-upon-Tyne (UK), 16th October 2006 - press show
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