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Marie-Antoinette review
:. Director: Sofia Coppola
:. Starring: Kirsten Dunst, Jason Schwartzman
:. Running Time: 2:03
:. Year: 2006
:. Country: USA
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For her third full-length film, director Sofia Coppola takes us on a remarkable and fleeting tour of Queen Marie-Antoinette's Versailles. Inspired by the writings of Antonia Fraser, the volatile filmmaker doesn't aim at showcasing historical facts, political rigor or the flashy symbolism of aristocratic decline. Instead she prefers to focus on glamorous and massive decorum, on a precise work of dialogue and casual music where languid minuets and unbridled rock become entangled. She draws up a splendid and elegant portrait of a stateless young woman who is both iridescent and resolutely modern.
A demanding film, Marie Antoinette requires the strong complicity of its audience, who would tend to be expelled by the acidulous world of the sparkling dauphine. The principal ambition is to lose us through flirting, like the heroine, in order to penetrate, with staggering empathy, an intimate universe severed from the moment — a universe of intoxication, frivolities and satiety. A grace Coppola shares in common with Japanese director Naomi Kawase, who advances under the seal of ingenuity and equity in the sense that each detail is considered without hierarchy. Luminous or abstract, we are propelled into amniotic fluid which can only be pierced by the maternal voice — in the vein of the parents of Virgin Suicides and the substitute father of Lost In Translation. It's a slow good-bye to the original paradise and a youth gone forever.
The narrative and formal structures show maturity. Initially there is this faculty to create a parallel temporality (outside of established chronology), to dilate or to displace the duration which almost blurs the disastrous destiny of the character. During the elegiac stays in Petit Trianon, the atmosphere eyes the strongholds of The New World and Sofia Coppola succeeds where Terence Malick failed, transforming the incomparable Kirsten Dunst into an irremovable base around which she can whirl.
By the inexorable dilution of the plot or some dazzling plunges — a clipped montage which shows coitus, orgasm and birth or ill-conceived expenditures and political tactics - the director manages to make us feel the place of the teenage nymph vis-a-vis History: her existential dissatisfaction, her duty as a wife and then as a mother.
It's a question of accompaning a Marie cut off from the world as she moves towards adulthood and her role as the future queen of France, whether it's through her eyes (icy reception, dressed up escapades...) or through the camera lens observing each one of her reactions, the image riveted on her avid and circling body (refusal of wide shots). The only true entity in this film, Marie-Antoinette reveals her bewitching face when she's alone onscreen, as when reading a missive, her dress gradually merges with the wallpaper. Like in Lost In Translation, a contrast is established between the erratic position of an ethereal actress and the borders of the screen.
More than the youth of the protagonists, confinement — physical and societal — is the theme of this story. Behind noxious superficiality, simmering excesses or macabre emancipation, it is a whole world which unravels in front of the sovereign and is confronted by her wit (applause at the Opera). A virtuoso and diffuse mega-film with an iconoclastic credence & heteroclite distribution, Sofia Coppola's new opus is built on a series of transitions connecting various cultures, archaism and news. The silliness of the court, the fetichization of bodies, forced gestures and rites of passage, the anachronistic interludes and the morbid sensuality don't matter here. What's important is resisting total abandonment to the flow and enjoying the dizzying spell of transcendent freedom: a rare palliative for timeless anguish.
Frédéric Flament
Translated into English by Anji Milanovic
 Lost in Translation
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