Off with Her Head

Over the weekend, I saw Marie Antoinette. I had been looking forward to it for ages, because I really like Sofia Coppola as a director (we try to forget about her brief flirtation with “acting”*) and I’m a huge history dork with a soft spot for queens who lost their heads. Unfortunately, I had some issues with it. (Shocking, I know. As you’ve probably realized by now, I tend to have issues with everything.)

(Two warnings about what’s to come: spoilers and extreme dorkiness. Don’t say you weren’t warned.)

It’s really visually stunning, and it definitely works on an eye-candy level. However, the story doesn’t hold together very well. It’s just a series of cool-looking scenes thrown together without much thought for coherency. For example, we see Marie Antoinette have an affair with the handsome Swede Count Axel Fersen. First of all, there is no proof that the affair happened. Certainly, they had a relationship, but whether it was physical is impossible to say, since Marie Antoinette didn’t leave any evidence behind. (If only she had: Dear Diary, I totally hooked up with Axel last night. He’s like from Sweden and he is such a hottie and so much cuter than my fat**, boring, key-loving husband.) Some biographers do think they slept together, so I don’t really have a huge issue with her putting it in the movie, except that it seems to have no point. Fersen and MA sleep together, he leaves, and she wanders around Versailles thinking about him to the tune of “What Ever Happened” by the Strokes. We never see Fersen again. Why bother showing the supposed affair if they weren’t going to show his important role during the revolution? Fersen worked tirelessly to free MA and her family and was instrumental in a failed escape attempt. The affair seemed meaningless without this context.

Coppola chose to end the film with MA and Louis leaving Versailles in the early days of the Revolution. I can see why she made this choice (she would have really had to condense things a lot to get the subsequent events in and a lot of ugliness would have intruded into an otherwise pretty movie), but by leaving out most of the Revolution, she missed out on the chance to really show MA growing as a person. We see hints of this when she refuses to leave Versailles, saying that her place is with her husband, but this seems to come out of nowhere since she hasn’t exactly shown great devotion to him up to that point. During the family’s captivity, MA showed great strength of character and she is said to have gone to her death with dignity and courage.

Not that it was all bad: I did think some parts of the film were extremely effective. The portrayal of the elaborate rituals that surrounded every move the royal family made were very well done. And the constant whispering that surrounds MA at Versailles really was very effective at conveying the fishbowl atmosphere in which she lived.

If you are at all interested in it, I would certainly recommend seeing it, as despite my complaints, there is a lot of good in it, and if you’re not all that interested in the dorky historical details, the good may outweigh the bad.

*But we were in favor of her designing career, except that we’ve always been bitter that none of her cute clothes fit us because they are made for women with freakishly long torsos (or perhaps we just have a freakishly short torso?).
**Louis and some of his siblings were rather corpulent. It’s said that when Marie Antoinette first arrived in France, she was surprised by how much Louis ate.