Marie Antoinette

Here’s another of those love it or hate it films; to dispense with suspense -- I loved it. It helps to have watched a recent PBS documentary on the reviled French queen, or to have read the revisionist Antonia Fraser biography, but Sofia Coppola is eminently successful in constructing her own alternate reality. It helps to have the real Versailles as your stage set, and amazing costume and set design. It also helps to have an amazing cast, from Kirsten Dunst on down. I liked Jason Schwartzman as Louis XVI more than as Max Fischer in Rushmore, and that’s saying something. Right down the line the casting is off-beat but spot-on: Marianne Faithful as the Austrian empress, Steve Coogan as the ambassadorial adviser, Judy Davis as mistress of French protocol, Rip Torn as Louis XV, right through to major French star Mathieu Amalric in a walk-on role. With one possible exception, the ’80s music -- described as post-punk by those who know more than I -- worked amazingly well too. I was prepared to find the anachronistic acting and music annoying, but instead found it continuously engaging in recasting Marie Antoinette as the first teenage celebrity, which may be an exaggeration but is no lie. This is definitely a film to astonish the eye and the ear. As a radical egalitarian, I would have been surprised as any to hear in advance that two of the best films of 2006 would focus on unsympathetic Queens. However, since the essential moral purpose of cinematic art is to broaden our sympathies, it is just as worthy to elicit our sympathy for a misbegotten Royal as one of the criminal underclass. Sure, this isn’t the real story of the French Revolution, but it is a real story of a young girl stripped of her bearings and thrust into a situation out of her control, in which she must nonetheless discover herself. And that may be truer to history than one would imagine. (2006, dvd, n.) *8-* (MC-65.)