“The problem of leisure/What to do for pleasure.”
The opening lines of “Natural’s Not in It,” by the Gang of Four, are the first words in Sofia Coppola’s “Marie Antoinette,” and they suggest one of that film’s paradoxical themes: The pursuit of sensual delight is trivial compared with other undertakings - just as “the problem of leisure” is surely more of a privilege than a burden - but pleasure is also serious, one of the things that gives life its shape and meaning.
It may be tempting to greet “Marie Antoinette” with a Jacobin snarl or a self-righteous sneer, since it is after all the story of the silly teenager who embodied a corrupt, absolutist state in its terminal decadence. But where’s the fun in such indignation? And, more seriously, where is the justice? To say that this movie is historically irresponsible or politically suspect is both to state the obvious and to miss the point.
“Marie Antoinette," is a thoroughly modern confection, blending insouciance and sophistication, heartfelt longing and self-conscious posing with the guileless self-assurance of a great pop song. What to do for pleasure? Go see this movie, for starters.
“Natural’s Not in It” (speaking of great pop songs) blasts over the electrifying pink-and-black opening titles, kicking us into 18th-century Versailles with a jolt of anachronism. (Later there is some period-appropriate Rameau to go with the 80’s post-punk Ms. Coppola favors, and a high-top sneaker tucked amid the fabulous ancien régime couture.) But despite all the bodices and breeches, the horse-drawn coaches and elaborate perukes, “Marie Antoinette” is only masquerading as a costume drama. It would be overstating the case to call it a work of social criticism, but beneath its highly decorated surface is an examination, touched with melancholy as well as delight, of what it means to live in a world governed by rituals of acquisition and display. It is a world that Ms. Coppola presents as exotic and unreal - a baroque counterpart to the Tokyo of “Lost in Translation” - but that is not as far away as it first seems.
Ms. Coppola, who drew upon Antonia Fraser’s revisionist biography of Marie Antoinette, “Marie Antoinette: The Journey,” in preparing her script, is less a historian than a pop anthropologist, and her portrait of the young queen, played with wily charm by Kirsten Dunst, is not so much a psychological portrait as a tableau of mood and atmosphere. Highly theatrical and yet also intimate and informal, “Marie Antoinette” lets its story slink almost casually through its lovingly composed and rendered images.
The costumes, designed by Milena Canonero, are arresting; K K Barrett’s production design is appropriately sumptuous; and Lance Acord’s cinematography catches both the swirls of high-fashion color and the quieter, candlelighted tones of the French court. No mere backdrop, Versailles, where much of “Marie Antoinette” was shot, is the film’s subject and, in some respects, its star. Like Hollywood - which it resembles in some interesting and hardly accidental particulars - Versailles is a place with an aura and a power of its own, with an almost mystical ability to warp the lives of those who, by accident or choice, come to dwell on its grounds.
And the film’s visual extravagance somehow conveys its heroine’s loneliness as well as the sheer fun of aristocratic life. We know how this story ends, and Ms. Coppola refrains from showing us the violent particulars, or from sentimentalizing her heroine’s fate, preferring to conclude on a quiet, restrained note that registers the loss of Marie’s world as touchingly as the rest of the film has acknowledged her folly, her confusion and her humanity.