October 25, 2006

Marie Antoinette

I’m torn on Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette. I kind of hated it, but I hate my reasons for hating it. I think that objecting to the underlying message of a film is usually unfair; atheists should be able to appreciate religious films and vice versa. But Coppola’s decision to leave the politics out of a story about royalty in 18th century France on the cusp of revolution is too large an omission to ignore. Could one make a movie about George III, Nicholas II or Mikhail Gorbachev without the politics? When you strip a historical figure’s story of all its political relevance, not much is left, especially when that person is Marie Antoinette, the Paris Hilton of her day. So let’s get this out of the way: the acting’s fine, the cinematography’s fine, the costumes are fine, I’ve got no problem with any of that.

What’s worth discussing is what, exactly, Sofia Coppola is trying to say with this movie. The opening minute or two sums up its muddled message. As Gang of Four’s “Natural’s Not In It” blares on the soundtrack, titles flash by in the Sex Pistols’ Never Mind The Bollocks font. We cut to a shot of Antoinette, head reclined with a slight smile on her face as a servant puts her shoes on for her (we all know how difficult it can be to put on our own shoes). She lazily runs her finger across the massive cake that’s just sitting around and licks the icing off of it, laughing at the obscene decadence that’s just part of her everyday life. This scene is supposed to present Antoinette as an aristocratic rock star who lives an opulent life that we mere peasants can only dream of, an episode of Cribs set 150 years before TV was invented. More importantly, we’re supposed to like her and wish we could be her. But it only made me hate her. All I could think about during this scene, and most of the movie, was the fact that this woman lived a lifestyle that helped bankrupt a nation to the point that tens of thousands of people were starving to death while she worried about having miniature birds woven into her hair. Of course, she didn’t start these problems or make the choices that caused them; the fault there would lie with her husband and his predecessors. They were the ones who made abysmal decisions like getting enmeshed in other countries’ wars (ours) instead of solving the problems at home (now there’s a good, timely idea for a movie).

But the real problem was the concept of monarchy altogether. These people were raised with the ultimate sense of entitlement and were so distanced from the reality of their subjects’ lives that they were doomed to fail. Coppola touches on this by mocking the ludicrous “way things are done” in a few scenes, but only in the tone of a highbrow comedy of manners. She even subtly refers to the social consequences of Antoinette’s behavior in one quick scene after a long night of partying, where she wakes up with a hangover to see servants cleaning up her mess. Even that nauseating opening sequence scoffs at its subject; the Sex Pistols and Gang of Four were as famous for their socialism as they were for their music, and the lyrics couldn’t be more critical, sarcastically lamenting the wealthy’s “problem of leisure, what to do for pleasure?”

But I think the irony of this is lost on Coppola, who, it’s worth noting, is herself a child of privilege. Her films have always carried a “poor little rich girl” sentimentality; the only real difference between Antoinette here and Scarlett Johansson’s character in Lost In Translation is that Johansson’s actions didn’t have national repercussions. And for me, that’s a big difference. A normal person can have her head in the clouds, but a leader with her head in the clouds is dangerous, and failing to explain that makes this film useless. Coppola seems more than eager to cast her subject in a light that makes her relevant to audiences today – hence the well-publicized pop soundtrack – but only on the shallowest level possible. What really makes Marie Antoinette matter today is darker than Coppola is willing to admit: her death at the guillotine (this movie ends long before that) represented the death of monarchy, and more importantly, the birth of democracy. Marie Antoinette isn’t about that in any way, shape or form.