Moviola > Films > Marie-Antoinette

Marie-Antoinette  (12A)   123 mins

Marie-Antoinette was only fourteen when she was sent from Austria to marry the sixteen-year-old heir to the French throne.  What she lacked in political acuity and experience she made up for with a warm and affectionate nature, but this was sadly  unappreciated in her new milieu and did not prevent her from becoming one of the most maligned women in history.  Marie-Antoinette is not your average historical film.  Sofia Coppola is not concerned with showing the social or political background to the French Revolution, and ends the film long before the royal couple go to the guillotine: rather, she is interested in this early example of celebrity culture.  Drawing on Antonia Fraser's brilliant biography, which on her own admission she read for the emotion rather than the facts, Coppola shows us Marie-Antoinette (Kirsten Dunst) as a sometimes silly and undeniably vain teenager who finds herself at the centre of the most extravagant and bitchy court in Europe, with unlimited spending power but few people whom she can trust.  The parallels with Hollywood are clear. 

The film was famously booed at Cannes and has divided the critics ever since.  Below are two plusses and a minus.

"Sofia Coppola's presentation of Marie's life has a sisterly, unjudging intimacy, and the director has carried off pert inventions and provocations with some style, combining dazzling visual tableaux and formal set-pieces in strict period, with new wave chart hits from the 1970s and 80s: these musical anachronisms lending ironic torsion to the overall effect." Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

"This mightn't be food for the soul, but it is a pleasurable sugar rush."  BBC Movies

"This is a movie that never gets to the point, perhaps because it doesn't recognize what the point is."  James Berardinelli

www.sonypictures.com/movies/marieantoinette/

Last modified: 20-Jun-2008

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