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neuro wrote:I don't seem to understand what the film had to say that couldn't have been said in a short film, or even a music video (which it resembled most).

I think this is the problem with the film that got me most. It established it's targets fairly early on but really went nowhere with it. I don't think you missed anything - in fact you got it completely - but two hours was far too long for such a thematically unambitious film.

editorial nods to All That Jazz

Funny because I thought the same thing. I told my friend at one point of the film that the editing seemed All That Jazz-y. One scene is warm and the next is icy. The editing style of All That Jazz is very alienating and harsh, which is exactly the point. And Coppola achieved the same thing. All That Jazz is one of her favorite films.

Another favorite film of Coppola is Schlesinger's Darling. MA has the similar vibe as this magnificent film.

Anyway, I really love one image in the early part of MA: after MA being stripped in that tent in the middle of chilly forest, she steps out of the tent and there's is a monstrous chandelier hanging in the background inside the tent with dead trees surrounding the tent. That is one really stunning image.

Michael wrote:All That Jazz is one of her favorite films. Another favorite film of Coppola is Schlesinger's Darling

Yes, but greatness is not achieved by being evocative of the greatness of others. MA's style may be in debt to All That Jazz and Darling, but--as good as they are--Coppola is no Fosse and Dunst (alias Dr. Sunkentits) is no Julie Christie.

I've always dreamed of making a movie out of the Capri sequence of Darling!

But this has been a very boring year for American movies at least for me. MA was a very lovely change... wholeheartedly welcomed.

Michael wrote:But this has been a very boring year for American movies at least for me. MA was a very lovely change... wholeheartedly welcomed.

Did you see Crank? You should see Crank.

Crank? Never heard of it but I will keep my eyes open for it.

Saw it tonight. One of the most aesthetically pleasing films i've seen in a while. I didn't leave feeling as empty as what i've read in terms of the substance in the film. I had fairly low expectations after what i've read and was very pleased with it. Sound track was amazing. Acting was great. The vacation house scenes in the movie were breathtaking. But all the same, if there is a bit more substance, i'm afraid it will require multiple viewings to absorb, that is if there is more substance than what is apparent from the first theatre viewing. Positive experience overall.

And more Asia Argento.

And the hair stylist. And Molly Shannon!

Coppola was smart to cut them off quickly because they could easily steal the show from Kirsten. They are far more interesting than the Marie character and I wonder if that says much about the film.

Michael wrote:Coppola was smart to cut them off quickly because they could easily steal the show from Kirsten. They are far more interesting than the Marie character and I wonder if that says much about the film.

Maybe it says much about Marie.

Did anyone else see this in a theater FULL of teenage/college age girls? Who all loved it? Very strange experience for me. I don't remember that happening since I saw My Best Friend's Wedding in the theater.

Yes, the screening that I attended was full of high school/college girls.. some with their boyfriends. I thought maybe it was because the theater was in between of two colleges. What I was mostly surprised about was there was no one with white hair. I was expecting a bunch of old ladies but it turned out that I was probably the oldest one there. No one walked out during that screening.

Lino wrote: ...and failed to see what Coppola was saying.

So, what exactly was Coppola saying?

Matt wrote:Did anyone else see this in a theater FULL of teenage/college age girls? Who all loved it? Very strange experience for me.

Michael wrote:Yes, the screening that I attended was full of high school/college girls..

Ok, am I missing something? I though that teenage/college girls were the target demographic for this film. At least, I assumed that's who the marketing was geared towards. I didn't think this outcome would be all that surprising.

Andre Jurieu wrote:Ok, am I missing something? I though that teenage/college girls were the target demographic for this film. At least, I assumed that's who the marketing was geared towards. I didn't think this outcome would be all that surprising.

Dude, I live in a small college town. I don't listen to radio, I skip over commercials with my TiVo, the only magazine I read is The New Yorker, and the movie theater I attend usually only shows the trailer that is attached to the print of the film by the studio. In short, I live in a movie marketing vacuum. And it is bliss.

But yeah, I guess I should have expected that I'd be enveloped in a cloud of of Love's Baby Soft* and the sound of snapping Bubble-Yum at the theater, but I didn't realize it until I actually got there.

* did I mention all the girls were wearing kneesocks and Bonne Bell Lip Smackers, too?

Matt wrote:Dude, I live in a small college town. I don't listen to radio, I skip over commercials with my TiVo, the only magazine I read is The New Yorker, and the movie theater I attend usually only shows the trailer that is attached to the print of the film by the studio. In short, I live in a movie marketing vacuum. And it is bliss.

I'm a little bit envious right now.

Matt wrote:But yeah, I guess I should have expected that I'd be enveloped in a cloud of of Love's Baby Soft* and the sound of snapping Bubble-Yum at the theater, but I didn't realize it until I actually got there.

* did I mention all the girls were wearing kneesocks and Bonne Bell Lip Smackers, too?

... and I think The Invunche is a little bit envious right now. If they were also wearing catholic school-girl outfits I think you might have just made his head explode.

Well, I'm glad I had a day to mull this one over before posting anything on it as if I had done so last night I would have been inclined to write the whole thing off. While I watched it I was very frustrated by it and not in a good way. I was irritated with it throughout and was glad when it was over. Having said all that, the movie should not be dismissed as just some product of indulgence or caprice. It has divided critics for good reason. Coppola's vision is inconsistent and finally not completely coherent but it is adamantly a uniquely held take and demands to be dealt with in those terms; it may require an adjustment in temperament just to meet it half way. Also, it is one of the few American pictures to ever seriously engage with the idea of aristocratic nobility and royalty; it's a mistake to assume that Coppola's seemingly light take is an innocuous or frivolous one. For the willingness to consider the continuing importance of something many wrongly assume to be irrelevant she deserves real critical attention. Nonetheless, the approach she takes and the conclusions she reaches are not necessarily compatible (though, in fact, they might be--that's what makes writing about this so difficult).

My main problem with the film is that it felt like a missed opportunity. I wanted to see something else quite frankly and I was never able to accommodate myself completely to the film Coppola had made. Now that I've seen it and know what I'm getting perhaps a second time through will prove to be more profitable. Perhaps not. It seemed as though it could not decide what kind of film it wanted to be. The pastoral, Malickesque middle section in which the lives of the idle rich are re-articulated through the medium of an Ivory soap commercial was especially painful. This was not boredom which revealed culture but boredom which simply bored. If that sense of stagnation is what Coppola was intending to communicate than she certainly succeeded. Still, that doesn't seem particularly hard to do. It is lyrical but it feels discordant. Once again, perhaps this extreme shifting in mood was intentional. It seems possible as upon reflection the film does feel as though it's designed to function in musical movements or as stanzas.

I was afraid going in that Coppola's admirable sympathy for Marie Antoinette would be mishandled, that she was really only interested in this character as an almost mythic progenitor of modern celebrity aristocracy. This idea has merit and is certainly an aspect of the film but I have the sense that she was actually going for something more amorphous: the memory of a dream of potentiality squandered.

I was also concerned that Coppola was using this story as an apologia for herself and there's almost no way to avoid making that association. But why is that not a fitting entry point? The movie, in its sketchy, haphazard, sometimes even clumsy and abrupt, musical movements does resonate like a meditation of a sort. The first half functions as the unavoidably facile modern imagining of a cloistered life of immense responsibility and significance. Our own celebrity culture looks pallid by contrast, though our collective meditation can only emanate from what we know of as aristocratic "nobility" in our own time. That is maybe why the rites and rituals of the court seem so curiously empty and ludicrous, why the presentation is so irreverent and why Marie herself is such an anomaly here as a sympathetic aristocratic figure.

I have to admit that I kept thinking of Visconti's Ludwig as I watched this and the comparison is unfair. If I'm right about what Coppola was striving for than the political and spiritual complexities of Visconti's film don't elude her as much as it first appears. There is some kind of post modern self-reflexive acknowledgment that we can't know these people and this time because we don't value anything they did. The self-reflexivity comes in the form of our own aristocrat Kirsten Dunst playing dress up in a big budget spectacle about someone who is comparable only superficially.

The ending seems key to an understanding of this film, if there is a comprehensive understanding to be had. I have to say that it ends perfectly. The final carriage sequence and the final shot suggest a great deal. Much has been made of the fact that we don't see the arrest or execution and this is not because Coppola is being coy. I think this choice reveals much. Certainly this is an enclosed world we are seeing but her point is not just that this kept its inhabitants from seeing "truth"; a certain kind of truth was privileged and perpetuated within the walls of the palace. The final shot is an empty and hollowed out signifier; empty though it might have already been it did not necessarily need to be, but the time it could have had any idealistic influence was over. My frustration with Coppola is that her point of view seems to limit the tragedy of the loss, to reduce its weight and import; it dissipates like a dream that was barely sustained or understood. But this, too, might be her intent.

Royalty and politicians (and the clergy for that matter) share the unfortunate fate that what is sensational and scandalized comes to affect the perception of all those who hold the same rank. Often this is the desire of those who engineer the outrage in the first place. The French Revolution left a power vacuum that was soon to be filled, but by whom and for what?

Oh, and FWIW, my audience was fairly small and insubstantial and the only young girls in attendance left half way through.

Roger Ebert gives it 4 stars, so I guess it's officially a masterpiece. #-o:roll:

Ten things that occurred to me while watching "Marie Antoinette."

1. This is Sofia Coppola's third film centering on the loneliness of being female and surrounded by a world that knows how to use you but not how to value and understand you. It shows Coppola once again able to draw notes from actresses who are rarely required to sound them.

2. Kristen Dunst is pitch-perfect in the title role, as a 14-year-old Austrian princess who is essentially purchased and imported to the French court to join with the clueless Louis XVI (Jason Schwartzman) to produce an heir. She has self-possession, poise and high spirits, and they are contained within a world that gives her no way to usefully express them. So she frolics and indulges herself, within a cocoon of rigid court protocol.

3. No, the picture is not informative and detailed about the actual politics of the period. That is because we are entirely within Marie's world. And it is contained within Versailles, which shuts out all external reality. It is a self-governing architectural island, like Kane's Xanadu, that shuts out politics, reality, poverty, society.

4. Schwartzman, like Bill Murray's character in "Lost in Translation," plays a sexually passive sad sack who would rather commiserate than take an active role. Danny Huston is priceless as Marie's older brother, brought in from Austria to give the young king a few helpful suggestions about the birds and the bees. The old king, randy Louis XV (Rip Torn), would certainly need no inspiration to perform, as his mistress, Madame du Barry, (Asia Argento) immediately observes.

5. All of Coppola's films, and this one most of all, use locations to define the lives of the characters. Allowed complete access to Versailles, she shows a society as single-mindedly devoted to the care and feeding of Marie Antoinette as a beehive centers on its queen.

6. On the border for the "official handover," Marie is stopped, stripped and searched to ascertain, brutally, if she is indeed a virgin and, for that matter, a female. In a deal like this, it pays to kick the tires. I was reminded of the scene in von Sternberg's "The Scarlett Empress" where Catherine arrives at the court of the Czar and the royal physician immediately crawls under her skirt to check her royal plumbing. Every detail is covered by the French authorities; they even confiscate her beloved dogs, but tell her, "You can have as many French dogs as you like."

7. Coppola has been criticized in some circles for her use of a contemporary pop overlay -- hit songs, incongruous dialogue, jarring intrusions of the Now upon the Then. But no one ever lives as Then; it is always Now. Many characters in historical films seem somehow aware that they are living in the past. Marie seems to think she is a teenager living in the present, which of course she is -- and the contemporary pop references invite the audience to share her present with ours. Forman's "Amadeus" had a little of that, with its purple wigs.

8. Everyone in the audience knows Marie Antoinette was beheaded and I fear we anticipate her beheading with an unwholesome curiosity. Coppola brilliantly sidesteps a beheading, and avoids bloated mob scenes by employing light, sound and a balcony to use Marie's death as a curtain call. Hired, essentially, to play a princess, she is a good trouper and faithful to her role. It is impossible to avoid thoughts of Diana, Princess of Wales.

9. Every criticism I have read of this film would alter its fragile magic and reduce its romantic and tragic poignancy to the level of an instructional film.

10. It is not necessary to know anything about Marie Antoinette to enjoy this film. Some of what we think we know is mistaken. According to the Coppola version, she never said, "Let them eat cake." "I would never say that," she says indignantly. What she says is, "Let them eat custard." But, paradoxically, the more you know about her, the more you may learn, because Coppola's oblique and anachronistic point of view shifts the balance away from realism and into an act of empathy for a girl swept up by events that leave her without personal choices. Before she was a queen, before she was a pawn, Marie was a 14-year-old girl taken from her home, stripped bare, and examined like so much horseflesh. It is astonishing with what indifference for her feelings the court aristocracy uses her for its pleasure, and in killing her disposes of its guilt.

Ebert's failure to single out Argento's perf indicates to me that he needs to retire.

Also the film doesn't deserve or invite analysis (which is why I liked it).

=P~

Roger Ebert wrote:9. Every criticism I have read of this film would alter its fragile magic and reduce its romantic and tragic poignancy to the level of an instructional film.

I think this is a wonderful observation from what is an astutely reasoned, perceptive review. I don't know why there needs to be forehead slapping and eyerolling over it.

Mr_sausage wrote:

Roger Ebert wrote:9. Every criticism I have read of this film would alter its fragile magic and reduce its romantic and tragic poignancy to the level of an instructional film.

I think this is a wonderful observation from what is an astutely reasoned, perceptive review. I don't know why there needs to be forehead slapping and eyerolling over it.

Perhaps because there is nothing particularly "fragile" about the film that comes just short of spoonfeeding its emotional content down your throat.

Antoine Doinel wrote:

Mr_sausage wrote:

Roger Ebert wrote:9. Every criticism I have read of this film would alter its fragile magic and reduce its romantic and tragic poignancy to the level of an instructional film.

I think this is a wonderful observation from what is an astutely reasoned, perceptive review. I don't know why there needs to be forehead slapping and eyerolling over it.

Perhaps because there is nothing particularly "fragile" about the film that comes just short of spoonfeeding its emotional content down your throat.

Ebert was referring to the film's effect, not to any particular element of the production. It is the 'magic' it produces that is fragile. This "spoon-feeding" or whatever you call it is hardly mutually exclusive with what Ebert just said (and is up for debate anyhow).

Mr_sausage wrote:Ebert was referring to the film's effect, not to any particular element of the production. It is the 'magic' it produces that is fragile. This "spoon-feeding" or whatever you call it is hardly mutually exclusive with what Ebert just said (and is up for debate anyhow).

I was merely pointing out one aspect of the film, but I think the "spoonfeeding" expands to a lot of other portions of the film and its overall effect. While there are (repetitive) ponderous moments, most are accented by a hip, lyrically spelled out soundtrack or fairly obvious payoffs.

We aren't given Antoinette's perspective, so much as told what it is. For all the delicate pastries in the film, it comes across as so much week old bread.

Barmy wrote:Also the film doesn't deserve or invite analysis (which is why I liked it).

If that's the case, then it's not worth much.

Antoine Doinel wrote:We aren't given Antoinette's perspective, so much as told what it is.

This is a good summary of the discontent the film left in me. Coppola's biggest strength is her ability to solidify the ephemera of life that takes place between big events. Applying that any period piece would have been a tricky move, as history jumps from big event to big event, but to tackle a woman who's biggest and most memorable event was her death was damn bold of Coppola.

But in the end, I just don't think she could overshadow history's dictates (or at least she didn't do it in this incarnation.) A few sequences (the 'Plainsong' one especially comes to mind) and shots (there were a good couple of beautifully used held shots) brought Sofia's vision straight through, but as a whole John Cope hit it on the head -- much of it was 'boredom that simply bored.' It consistently seemed to be an outsider's view of Marie Antoinette's inside life. I was sort of expecting an insider's view (especially if you buy into Sofia making this as a semi-autobiographical project) -- history has already done the outsider thing.

-Toilet Dcuk

Just the other night I was watching The Scarlet Empress for the first time (it actually played on TV!) and I couldn't stop drawing comparisons to Marie Antoinette.

If you look at both of them on a surface level, there are plenty of similarities to be found (in a first viewing, that is) -- both feature young heroines coming from different nations to be married to someone they've never met (and would never meet their own expectations...); both Queen-to-be's find themselves in a situation they've never desired or had an inclination to be at but somehow manage to make the most of it; both directors (Sternberg and Coppola) seem to be infatuated with the visual possibilities of the story and the results are nothing short of astonishing; both films end when the real deal is about to begin, in the sense that they never show us what both heroines became most famous for (we never see the beheading of Marie Antoinette and The Scarlet Empress ends just at the very beginning of Catherine The Great's reign).

Antonia Fraser's thoughts on the film:

It was not until Sofia came over from L.A. on her way to Paris, breaking her journey to show me a rough cut of the film in November 2005, that I realized that rock 'n' roll was no code. The first blast of it nearly made me jump out of my comfortable chair in a screening room—just she and I—at the chic Covent Garden Hotel. Although I got to love it in the wild party scene. (In the end the music was Rameau 'n' rock 'n' roll, leading to some highly original music credits.) In March, in another chic screening room, at the Charlotte Street Hotel, Harold also nearly jumped out of his chair at the first blast, before coming, like me, to adore the film.

In principle I loved Sofia's use of anachronisms—the witty flash of sneakers amid a delicious montage of pink and turquoise shoes was especially pleasing. None of the liberties taken bothered me. As I had said to Sofia in the first place, "This is your vision. Mine is already between hard covers, and now it's your turn." I sometimes winced at the lack of formality with which Marie Antoinette was treated—but then, who did I think I was? Not Madame Etiquette, the Comtesse de Noailles, superbly played by Judy Davis. And I cut quite a lot of it in my book, to be frank. Certainly the things I had worried about didn't matter at all. I simply forgot about the varied accents, for example: such things matter only, I suspect, in a bad or boring film. Jason Schwartzman, for example, was a marvel, really very affecting in his failure-to-make-love scenes. Rip Torn as Louis XV, a terrific Hollywood satyr reminding me of the late producer Sam Spiegel; Mary Nighy a quiet, effective presence as "Lamballe the prude"; Steve Coogan a successfully dominating male figure. And it was all so endlessly, deliriously beautiful! (And, by the way, she didn't leave out the politics.)

I've left Sofia's real triumph to the last. Once again, the woman who kept her word had achieved exactly what she set out to do, as laid down in her pale-blue mission statement of January 2001. This movie really was "lost in Versailles," or in other words the getting of wisdom by a young girl in alien circumstances. With the aid of the incomparable Kirsten Dunst, she had focused us on Marie Antoinette's plight forever. As I was about to send Sofia a good-luck message for the opening of the movie at the Cannes Film Festival, I suddenly remembered that, starting my own research 10 years ago, I had wanted to do just that: rehabilitate the tragic queen. Sofia sent me a message, thanking me for being such a good godmother to the film ("godmother" is a striking word from a Coppola). I answered, "Vive la Reine" (generally the heading of our e-mails), and, even more to the point, added, "Viva Sofia."

Full article here.