Marie Antoinette, as Sofia Coppola imagined it, is all about beauty, ‘sparkle’ and femininity as the only pleasures available to a woman in a society where she is just a bargaining chip to be bought and sold—even by her mother, a political force in her own right.
Coppola gives us Kirsten Dunst, a star we are familiar with precisely for her lack of uber-glamness, her waifish build and glowing skin with little makeup, and transforms her before our eyes into the Queen, powdered white and perfect, hair not just styled but turned into a living sculpture on her head, seizing her pleasures where she can.
Marie Antoinette is, after all, denied even the freedom to dress herself in the mornings, and her husband is incapable of sexual performance, so she is denied not only pleasure in sex, but her very identity. It must be her fault, after all, that he cannot perform.
Beauty is both a millstone round her neck and the thing that saves her, at least for a time. She is dressed in the clothing of her new country—the forcible public removal of her clothing happens more than once in this film—and presented to her new husband as a cake upon a platter. The same as the cakes she so gleefully crams into her mouth later, and like the one she is mistakenly accused of telling the people to eat when they have no bread.
The aunts are jealous of her beauty, and they turn her against the one woman who might have helped her gain any freedom and happiness, Madame Du Barry, the old king’s mistress, played lushly by Asia Argento, all blacks and reds to Marie’s pastels and blonde. Du Barry is of course the ‘whore,’ yet she wants nothing more than to be friends with Marie, and is only angered when she is spurned. The simple pleasure on her face when Marie speaks to her is telling—and leads directly into a scene contrasting her lively sex life with the aging King and Marie and Louis’s bedtime conversation.
Later, of course, Marie takes up with another woman of questionable virtue, and it is then when she starts to have her own life.
The dressing sequence makes much not only of her nakedness, but of her disinterest in such things at the beginning—she dislikes the pomp and circumstance, and would rather play with her dogs.
The more she is discounted as a woman because of her sexless marriage, the more outsize her performance of “woman” becomes. Her hair gets bigger, her clothes wilder, her pleasures more outlandish, and her husband, who cannot satisfy her in the way that she needs most, gives in to her every whim.
Again, the placement of scenes is telling when Coppola goes from Marie weeping over childlessness to her shopping—and eating!—with her friends. Pretty things are her only freedom and pleasure, gambling her only real adventure. She knocks over a champagne glass and Coppola zooms in on the frosting on the lips of one of her companions—the mouth separated from the rest of the woman as if in a porn shot, but instead of semen we get sugar.
Afterward, the women lie exhausted on a bench, three of them piled together.
Marie first meets her choice of lover soon after this, while in disguise at a ball. Her mask is a tiny scrap of material, but it is symbolic—she is not herself, so she can give in to her desires.
And when she finally does have sex, Coppola cuts almost immediately to her giving birth. That is, after all, the only purpose of sex with her husband, despite the aura given off by that blissful moment of her in the grass.
Her daughter is a disappointment to the court, but a comfort to her—another woman, and at the very least proof that she is viable. Curiously, the requirement to produce visible proof of viability here is all on the woman, despite the usual equation of such things with men.
In contrast, when she has sex of her choice we are treated to loving shots of his body, and the two of them steam up the screen just with eye contact across the table. His body fills the screen, while she is off to the side, or covered by him—he is the object of our gaze.
This movie was dismissed by a bunch of people as an upper-class fantasy, as evidence of how out of touch Coppola was, and it’s true that it doesn’t deal with the social problems of France at the time of Marie Antoinette. But it’s much more than that. It deals with femininity not only as something enforced upon women, but in the myriad ways they can find and take pleasure in it. And in the end, how they are blamed for salvaging whichever pleasures they can from the life handed them. After all, we know what happened to Marie Antoinette.
His body fills the screen, while she is off to the side, or covered by him—he is the object of our gaze.
This is an interesting observation, and it’s something I think I missed when I saw the movie in the theater. I remember really liking the film and how slowly it moved and how attentive to detail it was. I think it caught some criticism for this, too, but I found it visually tasty.
You know, the only reason I wanted to see this movie was because I heard Siouxsie and the Banshees’ Hong Kong Garden was used. Much to my dismay, I really liked this movie. Normally, Kirsten Dunst makes me stabby (there is something about her that just irritates me). But I really liked her in this. I even cried a little at the end (I saw it right after I had my baby, leave me alone!). What I liked was that Coppola really showed just how inept these (basically) children were at running a country. Of course everything is going to go to shit - there are kids in charge here, kids who have no concept of anything except extravagance. I also liked how well Dunst portrayed Marie Antoinette as someone who would deal with depression by eating sweets and buying pretty clothes and being generally over-the-top - she needed attention from someone, right? It actually really irritated me how much I liked this movie, and how I could relate to Dunst’s portrayal since I am usually so opposed to her in any capacity. Just goes to show how I shouldn’t discount anything til I give it the ol’ college try.