Marie Antoinette

I liked Marie Antoinette, yes I did. I liked the music, I liked the costumes, I liked the shoes and I liked the story. And before the Diplomat jumps at me, I have three words for him: High School Musical. There now quiet down peanut gallery.

The movie has a lot of good and a lot of bad, which I guess makes it controversial. The acting is terrible, but Kristen Dunst and Jason S (not sure what his last name is) are not good actors, and they tend to deliver flat lines and flat characters. It was hard watching that, but she is a pretty adorable girl in the same way Marie Antoinette was, she was a bit more aristocratic, at least from the portraits that exist. Versailles is beautiful; there are only a handful of palaces in the world that can show how absolute power reigned. It is a world within a world, a place where reality is not accepted. It is in fact rejected and a new reality was created out of marble, and limestone. The Grand Trianon and the Petit Trianon are perfect examples.

But to get to my point, the thing that impressed me the most about the movie was the way Sofia Coppola tells the tale. I have to say that I read Steven Zweig biography of the late French queen, and not Antonia Fraser’s (the one the movie is based on) and I have always felt that no matter who had married Louis the XVI th, the outcome would have been the same. France had been ruled by the Bourbons with little regard to the middle and lower classes for centuries, and the American Revolution which was partly sponsored by France and the food shortages led to the peasant (I would severely question, this fact, it was mostly a revolution organized and lead by the bourgeoisie, who wanted to have more say in the country’s affairs) uprising that we now call the French Revolution. There was looting and many, many of the lower aristocrats were killed, and most of the high ranking aristocrats were able to flee the country and then returned after Robespierre’s Reign of Terror. It has always been my theory that any other European princess would have had the same fate, of course this is a game of what ifs that is not worth playing to far, but history time and time again comes full circle and we see how the individuals in power are puppets of currents that sweep the globe as much as they are makers of their and their people’s destinies.

That said, the movie shows us that world, so often romanticizes by novelists and play writes, and shows us if not exactly how it was and how people talked and acted a good insight into the ridiculous situations this people were thrown into. How could they not loose all contact with reality when they had to put on a show every morning, and when they would eat lunch and be a show for the rest of courtiers. Those were the themes that resounded with me from the movie and which made it an interesting and thoughtful exercise in movie making.