Marie Antoinette
Directed by Sofia Coppola
Sofia Coppola’s dumb notion to set the 18th century story of Marie Antoinette to early 1980s British post-punk and New Wave music never works. First, she rips off the failed anachronistic pop style of A Knight’s Tale (and shows far less commitment to the idea). Secondly, she doesn’t seem to know why any of that music—or the history that led to the French Revolution—is important.
Even more shocking is the number of critics and cultural gatekeepers who share Coppola’s, shall we say, indifference. Try this quote from the New York Film Festival brochure touting Marie Antoinette’s U.S. premiere: “A sly, absolutely contemporary vision of the cocoon that is 21st century celebrity, where the rich and famous are blissfully oblivious to reality.” This attempt to ratify Coppola’s inanity is almost scandalous. Nothing in Marie Antoinette is sly or blissful. It’s entertainment weakly, blatantly flaunting idiocy as art—to justify bourgeois indulgence at any cost.
Disregarding the significance of the French Revolution is natural for the post-Reagan era: The rich are worshipped, envied and celebrated in every aspect of our culture. Coppola isn’t a prophetess, she’s merely the doyenne of modern privilege. Critics approve this subconsciously—which explains the ludicrous praise of Coppola’s Lost in Translation, a poor-little-rich-girl drama that hipsters deluded themselves was something deep. It was simply a Tiffany egg reenactment of Life without Zoe, the half-hour fantasy that Francis Ford Coppola directed for New York Stories, taken from a script written by his then 16-year-old daughter (who ripped the idea from Kay Thompson’s Eloise books).
The impulse to not question or critique Sofia Coppola’s vainglory can be gleaned from the foolishness of Marie Antoinette’s pop music gimmick. Her misreading of the great pop revolution represented by punk, post-punk and New Wave is part of our current political smugness. She doesn’t perceive what was special about that exhilarating moment when young folk used their political consciousness to inspire each other with clever, heartfelt political/musical pronouncements—a cultural revolution matched but not surpassed by American hip-hop.
Over the film’s opening credits, Coppola uses Gang of Four’s jittery, agit-prop “Natural’s Not In It” to introduce Marie’s handover from Austrian royalty to a French marriage—an opulent show of pomp and protocol. The song’s meaning is obliterated in Coppola’s fashion-magazine visual ironies. Its lyrics: “The problem of leisure/What to do for pleasure” personally challenged teen-pop listeners, but that provocation is as thoughtlessly disregarded as the infamous “Let them eat cake” line history credited to Marie Antoinette (which Coppola pointedly disavows). And Gang of Four’s aggressive, angular rhythms fade under the swish of brocade and silk. Coppola sees no problem in leisure or passive film-watching; she celebrates leisure and luxe more than those MTV reality shows about California highlife.
Coppola doesn’t merely sympathize with adolescent-girl petulance. She turns her back on history, rather than examine its political ramifications. Call this ideology Trousseau Feminism. She specializes in stories that mope, “Poor, Poor, Pitiful Me.” If Coppola had an informed sense of pop history, she might have included the 1976 Linda Ronstadt song of that title—but then its pampered chick ironies were actually composed by Warren Zevon, which would prevent Coppola from claiming the Trousseau Feminism that is her cultural capital. The way Marie Antoinette sides with its super-naïve protagonist (portrayed with sexy loveliness by Kirsten Dunst) while disdaining her antagonists (Asia Argento as Madame Du Barry, Marie’s déclassé mirror figure; Jason Schwartzman as the Dauphin, a teenage royal every bit as infantile as Marie) recalls the narcissism of a Jane Campion film. I guess every movie decade gets its characteristic fraudulent female auteur.
Marie Antoinette suggests a dumbed-down version of Sternberg’s Catherine the Great movie The Scarlet Empress (1934) that pitied Catherine’s loneliness as a pawn in international politics. Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich satirized spiritual corruption while detailing the sensual privilege afforded by a rise to power. Their erotically complex critique of privilege felt instinctual—like post-punk rebellion. But despite Coppola’s girlish nuances (reducing Marie’s boredom and restlessness to gossip and silk undies), she flattens youthful smarts. Marie Antoinette’s music-cinema connection is as infuriating as Scorsese’s similarly absurd matching of The Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” to a race riot in The Departed. Coppola nibbles revolutionary pop like the oracular New Order and the polemical Gang of Four as if it were cake.
