Marie Antoinette (Sofia Coppola, 2006)

[Antoine Doinel]

But she is using (remixes) of Bow Wow Wow. More on the soundtrack from Pitchforkmedia this morning:

Kevin Shields Remixes Bow Wow Wow for Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette Soundtrack

[Barmy]

What a silly, transient, pedestrian selection of soundtrack artists. I am a BIG fan of Go4 and Siouxsie, and also like NO and BWW and some of the others. But this just reeks of an attempt to be "cool".

[tavernier]

Jesus....I had no use for her first 2 films, and I don't think that will change here. ](*,)

[Antoine Doinel]

What a silly, transient, pedestrian selection of soundtrack artists. I am a BIG fan of Go4 and Siouxsie, and also like NO and BWW and some of the others. But this just reeks of an attempt to be "cool".

Considering she's using the exact same people she did for her last two soundtracks I don't think this is any attempt by her part to be "cool". It's already pretty well established she's a music geek/fan. She's certainly found her audience already and for a woman that her her own line of canned champagne, I don't think she's worried about proving herself to anyone.

[tavernier]

That's true...she's already proven that she's a lousy director.

[Barmy]

I haven't seen Virgin, but I don't recall a bunch of poptunes in Lost. Yes she used MBV for some of the music, which actually was mildly intelligent.

I have no need to see a bunch of people flouncing about in costumery to "Hong Kong Garden" or whatever.

[Fletch F. Fletch]

I haven't seen Virgin, but I don't recall a bunch of poptunes in Lost. Yes she used MBV for some of the music, which actually was mildly intelligent.

There is a great use of "Just Like Honey" by The Jesus and Mary Chain during the best part of the film. It was the most airplay they've gotten in years!

[Oedipax]

Music-related concerns about "cred" and whether or not someone is trying to be "hip" or "trendy" + film criticism = train wreck. Why is it so hard for people to accept contemporary music in a period film? And why are the ones most vocal about their objections the same ones who otherwise worship said bands? Why is their ostensible forward-thinkingness with respect to music the exact opposite (i.e. oppressively conservative) when it comes to cinema? What the fuck is going on here?

[solaris72]

Why is it so hard for people to accept contemporary music in a period film?

Seconded. One may as well complain about how "Also Sprach Zarathustra wasn't even written yet at the dawn of man!"

[tavernier]

That's disingenuous: most movies, even if they're period pieces, have original scores. The New World had Wagner, Mozart and James Horner, none of whom - as far as I'm aware - were alive when John Smith landed in Jamestown.

[Barmy]

There is a HUGE difference between music used as atmosphere--e.g. classical music or My Bloody Valentine--and randomly dropping "I Want Candy" into a period flick supposedly because Marie and Annabella have so much in common.

And I don't object to the CONCEPT of using New Wave music in period films. What I object to is Sophist's use of a tracklist that only some phony Brooklyn hipster would think is "original". It is a substitute for thinking. If she had been more creative in her choices I wouldn't have a problem with it.

[hearthesilence]

New Order ain't that 'hip' anymore (their last album wasn't good), but I like them all the same. It's good she's doing something new, I hate period pieces stamped with the same, stale style, all in the name of "taste." Having said that, this could backfire pretty badly, but we'll see.

[Barmy]

Maybe it'll bring in the "kids"!!!!!!!

[hearthesilence]

Yeah, kids 30 and over.

[sevenarts]

interesting. i certainly have no problem in general w/ pop music being used in film, and all the music in lost in translation was very tastefully handled, so i could certainly be wrong... but that tracklist does seem a bit over the top. i can't imagine aphex twin or squarepusher working AT ALL with a period piece of this type, even less so than any of the 80s pop choices. and the trailer looks like absolute fluff anyway, if it's even a semi-accurate reflection of the film's tone. i guess coppola feels the need to make something different after two rather quiet and melancholy films, but this doesn't look like there's much depth to it. i'd love to see an interview w/ coppola discussing the film, to see what she was aiming for here, because based on the admittedly small info of the trailer, it looks like a skip.

[hearthesilence]

i can't imagine aphex twin or squarepusher working AT ALL with a period piece of this type

Man, ever see Aphex Twin's videos? When that music hits, I'm gonna picture every one of those characters with Richard D. James's face!

[Dear Catastrophe Totoro]

She obviously has a style of music she enjoys, and she's putting it into her films. If she excluded this music that she obviously loves so much for something more "fitting" or trendy in her film (like a normal period score, or if she cut The Strokes out and put in Black Dice for those New York snobs), then she would be a fake. Just a thought. And actually, Black Dice could work.

I think Lost in Translation's soundtrack is perfect, and her transitions are original and subdued. For instance, I love the way you can still hear MBV's Sometimes reverberate in your ears after they get back to the hotel, or, well, every second of the karaoke scene. (Bill Murray singing Elvis Costello? Perfection. Also, notice how the music is muffled when they step out into the hallway. Most young directors try to maximize the volume of pop songs in every scene.) And as Fletch has already pointed out, the use of Just Like Honey at the end is about as memorable as a film's soundtrack can get.

By the way, sevenarts, I'm guessing she'll go with a softer Squarepusher song (like the one in Lost) rather than a noise-art or Bitches Brew-fusion/electronic song. And some of AT's stuff from Selected Ambient Works could be perfect.

One more thing...just because we only see the cast running around to New Order in the trailer doesn't mean that's what every character will be doing for the entire film, despite what Amy Phillips thinks. Who can tell how deep or shallow this film will actually be? Does French electro-pop come to mind when you think of American suburbia in the 70's? And imagine, there's style and content in that film!

[rs98762001]

I'm gonna picture every one of those characters with Richard D. James's face!

Now there's a missed opportunity. She should have cast Richard James as Louis XIV.

[sevenarts]

i can't imagine aphex twin or squarepusher working AT ALL with a period piece of this type

Man, ever see Aphex Twin's videos? When that music hits, I'm gonna picture every one of those characters with Richard D. James's face!

haha yea. the chris cunningham directors' series dvd is definitely a favorite, really terrifying stuff.

totoro is right of course, both of these guys have softer songs that would, if not quite work, then at least not be quite as jarring as throwing in "windowlicker" or "come to daddy" or something. although "come to daddy" would be pretty hilarious playing when marie gets guillotined.

[zedz]

Man, ever see Aphex Twin's videos? When that music hits, I'm gonna picture every one of those characters with Richard D. James's face!

haha yea. the chris cunningham directors' series dvd is definitely a favorite, really terrifying stuff.

In the interests of historical accuracy (and going wildly off-topic), the idea did not originate with Come to Daddy:



I'll never understand why The Auteurs were left off the Cunningham DVD, even when you can glimpse images from Light Aircraft on Fire on the menus and in the book.

[Antoine Doinel]

totoro is right of course, both of these guys have softer songs that would, if not quite work, then at least not be quite as jarring as throwing in "windowlicker" or "come to daddy" or something. although "come to daddy" would be pretty hilarious playing when marie gets guillotined.

Aphex Twin - ahem, Richard James - has quite a bit of ambient electronic work that he is also known for which I could see working in the movie.

[John Cope]

I've been looking forward to this as I liked her other work and I am certainly not put off by the trailer. However, I am anxious to hear what her overall point is. For me, that will seal the deal. This could work beautifully so long as Coppola doesn't attempt to make some kind of half-baked correlation between M.A. and, say, Paris Hilton. Yes, celebrities are the new aristocracy and yes, they don't understand the historic role and responsibilities of that class but are we supposed to believe that the former aristocracy were just proto celebrities? Or, better yet, proto celebrities afflicted with teen angst? There are aspects of the trailer that suggest My So-Called French Revolution and I really don't think we need that.

As far as the music goes, where the hell is INXS? Or Depeche Mode? Or Talk Talk (Life's What You Make It was used very effectively in Akin's Head-On).

Actually, I guess Galaxie 500 would fit in best with the rest of her playlist.

[TedW]

I know this would give many of you nothing to write about, but... how about we wait to see the movie before determining if her soundtrack choices work or not?

I am no huge fan of hers, believe me... but I'll float her the benefit of the doubt until I see this thing.

(Since critics are so in love with her and her pedigree, plus the fact the movie's about the French, here's my Cannes prediction: Palm D'or.)

[Don Lope de Aguirre]

(Since critics are so in love with her and her pedigree, plus the fact the movie's about the French, here's my Cannes prediction: Palm D'or.)

Wow... I wasn't aware that she had serious backers! Her films have both struck me as pleasant but insubstantial. I think that mainstream film needs more people of her talent but to claim that her and, say, Alexander Payne are anything more than very good 'Hollywood' film makers I think is overstepping the mark.

As for Cannes...increasingly the festival puzzles me. It selection criteria is often just weird but I suspect with a lot of money floating around...

If Michael Moore can win the Palme D'Or with a television standard documentary anyone can!

[Antoine Doinel]

The NY Times splits on the movie:

Marie Antoinette': Best or Worst of Times?

CANNES, France, May 24 — Though no one called for the filmmaker's head, "Marie Antoinette," Sofia Coppola's sympathetic account of the life and hard-partying times of the ill-fated queen, filled the theater with lusty boos and smatterings of applause after its first press screening on Wednesday. History remembers the queen for her wastrel ways, indifference to human suffering ("Let them eat cake") and death by guillotine, but Ms. Coppola's period film, which is playing in competition, conceives of her as something of a poor little rich girl, a kind of Paris Hilton of the House of Bourbon.

Kirsten Dunst stars as the Austrian princess who was just 14 when she arrived in the French court at Versailles in 1770, as part of an alliance between her mother, the powerful Maria Theresa of Austria, and the French king, the grandfather of her betrothed, the future Louis XVI (the unlikely Jason Schwartzman, in a bit of gag casting).

Her youth and apparent ignorance locked the future queen in a welter of self-indulgence from which she had no reason to escape, or so Ms. Coppola vainly tries to suggest. From the moment Marie Antoinette arrives in France, after being literally stripped bare of her Austrian possessions, she is trussed up in silks and satins, feathers and furs, and restrained by the rituals of court life, as much prisoner as princess.

This is Ms. Coppola's one idea, and it isn't enough. Although early scenes of Marie Antoinette submitting to protocol — if she wants a glass of water, one servant announces her request and another fulfills it — do make her point, it soon becomes clear that the director is herself bewitched by these rituals, which she repeats again and again. The princess lived in a bubble, and it's from inside that bubble Ms. Coppola tells her story. Thus, despite some lines about the American Revolution, which is helping drain the king's coffers and starve his people, Ms. Coppola ignores what's best about Marie Antoinette's story.

She doesn't seem to realize that what made this spoiled, rotten woman worthy of attention weren't her garden parties and fur-lined shoes, but the role she played in a bloody historical convulsion.

Ms. Coppola has an embarrassment of cinematic riches to play with, including the real Versailles, where Marie Antoinette lived most of her short adult life. With the help of the cinematographer Lance Acord and the production designer KK Barrett, both of whom worked on Ms. Coppola's last film, "Lost in Translation," and the costume designer Milena Canonero, who worked on "Barry Lyndon," she creates an opulent proto-Euro Disney cum rave where royals are really just 24-hour party people, full of fun and lots of cake. Soon after arriving at court Marie Antoinette asks a lady-in-waiting (Judy Davis in full twitch), "Isn't all this kind of ridiculous?" "This, madam," the woman answers haughtily, "is Versailles." But truly, madam, this is Hollywood. MANOHLA DARGIS


Holding a Mirror Up to Hollywood

CANNES, France, May 24 — The first sounds you hear in "Marie Antoinette" are the abrasive guitar chords of the great British post-punk band Gang of Four. The effect may be jarring; this is not the kind of thing you normally associate with the 18th century. But the song turns out to be bracingly apt.

The first lines invoke "the problem of leisure/What to do for pleasure," one of the chief problems the title character will face. And the name of the song is "Natural Is Not in It," a fitting motto for a film that conjures a world of pure and extravagant artifice.

The applause after the press screening Wednesday morning — there was some! — was mingled with boos, perhaps from die-hard republicans (in the French rather than the American sense) offended by Sofia Coppola's insufficiently critical view of the ancien régime in its terminal decadence. In the movie, the hungry peasants and restless city dwellers who ultimately brought down the French monarchy are mainly a distant rumor, as the action takes place entirely within the hermetic world of the Bourbon court, with its intricate codes of behavior, its curious blend of idle hedonism and solemn purpose, its pervasive gossip and its obsession with fashion and appearance.

A bygone world, of course, as exotic and strange as the hoop skirts and bird-studded hairpieces that exalt Kristen Dunst's appealing American-girl features. Perhaps, but the music is not the only aspect of the movie that pushes it slyly toward the present. My earlier description of the courts of Louis XV and XVI could just as easily apply to 21st-century Hollywood, a parallel that, in "Marie Antoinette," is both transparent and subtle.

When Marie reads a radical pamphlet attacking the obscene, self-absorbed luxury of her life in Versailles — "Let them eat cake" and all that — she evokes nothing so much as a young movie star rolling her eyes at the latest scurrility in some trashy celebrity gossip blog.

The clothes, the parties, the flatterers, the entourage, the sham marriages and passionate adulteries: it's American celebrity culture but with better manners and (slightly) more ridiculous clothes. Affairs of state are conducted almost as it they were movie deals. (Are we over budget on that American War of Independence project? Better beef up the marketing campaign.)

But though it depicts a confectionary reality in which appearance matters above all, "Marie Antoinette" is far from superficial, and though it is often very funny, it is much more than a fancy-dress pastiche. Seen from the inside, Marie's gilded cage is a realm of beauty and delight, but also of loneliness and alienation.

It almost goes without saying that Ms. Coppola, daughter of Francis, is herself a child of Hollywood (as is Jason Schwartzman, her cousin). This is not to suggest that the film is veiled autobiography, but rather to speculate about why a movie about a long-dead historical figure should feel so personal, so genuine, so knowing.

The mixed response on the part of the critics may reflect a certain ambivalence, less about the movie itself than about our own implication in the rarefied society it imagines. To say it's a lot like Hollywood is to say that it's a lot like Cannes. Does that make us courtiers or Jacobins? Should we crown Ms. Coppola with laurels or hustle her into a tumbrel bound for the guillotine? I for one am happy to lose my head over "Marie Antoinette." A. O. SCOTT