GLENN KENNY'S REVIEW (posted 10/17/06)

More Marie Antoinette • NYFF 2006 Press Conference •NYFF 2006 Review • Film Stills

What is the social responsibility of the artist? According to the great Vladimir Nabokov, it's zip. By the lights of novelist Barbara Kingsolver, though, literature "is a tool for changing the world." (I would infer that Kingsolver views the other arts similarly.) Few artists — or perhaps I should say would-be artists — take quite as hard-core a stance as Nabokov; more of them tend to side with Kingsolver, but most occupy a middle ground, seeking to avoid preachy wet-noodle-ism while at the same time aspiring to, you know, relevance. This is just one reason why there's so much mediocre art around, but that's not the subject at hand here, so never mind. What is the subject at hand is director Sofia Coppola's third feature film, and if it is in fact true that the artist does have a social responsibility, it is undeniable that in reimagining the life story (or rather, part of the life story) of Marie Antoinette as a glitzy, sassy (in every conceivable sense of the word), anachronism-dotted comedy of manners, Coppola has completely abrogated said responsibility.

This made quite a few people very angry when the picture premiered at the Cannes film festival, and the range of their anger was at times surprising. I, for one, had no idea that so many of my colleagues cared so very deeply about the living conditions of the French peasantry in the 18th century, conditions that they were enraged to find barely even addressed in Coppola's film. I suppose I should be humbled that I work alongside so many incredibly conscientious humanitarians, and ashamed that I find Marie Antoinette to be a thoroughly delightful and, yes, provocative picture.

Loosely adapted from Antonia Fraser's largely sympathetic biography of the queen who was beheaded in the drawn-out terror of the French Revolution, Coppola's picture ends well before its heroine's execution and reserves its most penetrating political analysis for the thrusts and parries of court life at Versailles, to which Marie (played with preternatural winsomeness by Kirsten Dunst) is sent from Vienna to marry Louis XVI and thus strengthen the Franco-Austrian alliance. There, ladies-in-waiting jockey for position in assisting Marie, with, of all things, her morning toilette. Marie also contends with the deft condescension of the loathed Madame du Barry, consort of Louis XV (played, respectively, in two very deft casting moves, by Asia Argento and Rip Torn), and, most frustratingly, with her husband's complete lack of sexual interest in her. This is particularly problematic for Marie, as the above-cited Franco-Austrian alliance requires her to produce a male heir if it's going to gel properly. The thoroughly unschooled Marie's varied attempts to get the even more clueless Louis (hilariously underplayed by Jason Schwartzman) to at the very least raise an eyebrow occupy the movie's first half (in reality, their marriage was not consummated until seven years in, an idea only Chantal Akerman could do cinematic justice to); after Marie finally yields a boy, new challenges arise and Marie retreats from them without ever fully apprehending, or comprehending, them.

Does Coppola's depiction of her heroine's ignorance constitute a commendation of that ignorance? Some believe so, and Coppola's relative inarticulateness in interviews gives Marie-bashers the chance to conclude that the film's perspective doesn't derive from any aesthetic strategy so much as it does from an innate shallowness on Coppola's part. In the Minneapolis City Pages (and again in the magazine Cinemascope), Rob Nelson sneered at Coppola's halting performance at the Cannes press conference for the film: "[Coppola looked] to star Kirsten Dunst in a beseeching manner that seemed in the context of this conspicuously consumptive movie to say, Can we go shopping now?" (This observation is mostly noteworthy in that one rarely sees such "Aren't chicks stupid?" sexism in an "alternative" publication.) As I noted in my observations on the film from the Cannes film festival, I think that, for all of Marie Antoinette's visual and aural bedazzlement, Coppola has made a compelling film about superficiality rather than a superficial film. I also believe that underneath its surfaces it contains plenty of pertinent observations on what it means for a woman to occupy an ostensible position of privilege. Disguised as a confection, and most effective as a cinematic intoxicant, Coppola's picture doesn't, finally, lack bite.

-Glenn Kenny