Marie Antoinette

Ultimately unsatisfying.

Film Review by Penny Bartlett | 12 Nov 2006
Film title: Marie Antoinette
Director: Sofia Coppola
Starring: Kirsten Dunst, Jason Schwartzman, Rip Torn
Release date: Out Now
Certificate: 12A

Sofia Coppola's revisionist realisation of 18th century Versailles takes us to a place of both self-indulgent excess and fastidious, suffocating ceremony. Kirsten Dunst as the fourteen year-old Austrian ingénue who becomes Queen of France copes with her isolation and her husband Louis XVI's (a wonderfully understated Jason Schwartzman) refusal to consummate their marriage by devoting her time to frivolity on a mass scale - throwing extravagant champagne-fuelled parties, consuming piles of opulent confectionary, and developing a gloriously camp wardrobe. The film concerns itself little with historical particulars, focusing instead on its young heroine and her heady lifestyle. While the evocative realisation of place and feeling echo that of 'Lost in Translation', here Coppola's dreamy, flowing style and distinct aesthetic approach is disrupted by too many other factors which vie for our attention. Elaborate set pieces, an Altmanesque ensemble cast (including both Marianne Faithful and Steve Coogan), distracting teen movie style dialogue and a self-consciously eclectic soundtrack that only sometimes works all result in a film that seems both indecisive and overdone, and is ultimately unsatisfying. [Penny Bartlett]

http://www.sonypictures.com/homevideo/marieantoinette/