‘Marie Antoinette’ is a tasty confection

REVIEW

By Christy Lemire

updated 7:47 p.m. ET Oct. 19, 2006

Marie Antoinette denies ever saying “Let them eat cake” in Sofia Coppola’s new film, dismissing it as if it were a tabloid rumor that she’d been spotted canoodling with a pop star in the VIP room of Paris’ most exclusive nightclub.

Whether or not she did utter the famous phrase, “Marie Antoinette” itself is so richly colorful and ornate, it looks as if the whole thing were confected out of frosting.

Coppola’s bold vision is lush and dreamy — often mesmerizing to watch — with the lovely, petite Kirsten Dunst playing the teen French queen as a romantic girly-girl, not a cold royal whose wild spending habits sent the country into turmoil.

Quick facts Starring: Kirsten Dunst, Jason Schwartzman, Asia Argento, Rip Torn, Molly Shannon Director: Sofia Coppola Run time: 2 hours, 1 minute MPAA rating: PG-13

This is someone who arrives from Austria at 14 for her arranged marriage to the heir to the French throne and tears up when they take away her cuddly pug puppy, a far cry from the decadent ruler who eventually would end up beheaded.

The mix of 18th-century costumes and settings with modern dialogue and New Wave music (Bow Wow Wow’s “I Want Candy” as Marie shops for shoes with her girlfriends) may be jarring to some, like Baz Luhrmann’s use of Top 40 hits in “Moulin Rouge!” or his staging of the “Romeo and Juliet” balcony scene in a swimming pool. With its elaborately theatrical arrangements, “Marie Antoinette” is the cinematic version of one of those glossy, 16-page ad spreads in the fall fashion issue of Vogue — probably for Dior or Versace.

Just go with it.

The movie is a blast — until the last half-hour or so, that is, when Coppola finally injects some historical context, which Dunst and Jason Schwartzman as Louis XVI discuss as convincingly as a couple of kids rehearsing their lines for a high school play.

Maybe that’s the point, though. Louis and Marie were just in their teens when they took over the throne; once his father dies, the new king even prays to God for help, acknowledging that they’re too young to rule. But in adapting Antonia Fraser’s book “Marie Antoinette: The Journey,” Coppola hurriedly inserts political perspective as if it were an afterthought, a consequence of focusing on style over substance.

Reteaming with Dunst, the star of her moody debut feature “The Virgin Suicides,” Coppola depicts Marie’s early years as she struggles to figure out how to act, what to do and say, in this foreign land surrounded by backstabbers and hangers-on. (Molly Shannon and Shirley Henderson play her gossipy aunts, and Rose Byrne is a hoot as her party-girl best friend.)

Marie snubs the mistress (Asia Argento, unrecognizable with her clothes on) of King Louis XV (a robust Rip Torn) because society dictates she should. In time she will find her own voice, though, applauding at the opera when it’s not customary and sneaking out for a masquerade ball in Paris (where Siouxsie and the Banshees are on the soundtrack).

FREE VIDEO ‘Marie Antoinette’ Kirsten Dunst stars as France's most misunderstood monarch in this new film by Sofia Coppola. Columbia Pictures

She finds the protocol suffocating, commenting to Judy Davis as the officious Comtesse De Noailles, “This is ridiculous,” when it takes five minutes to determine who among the court should help her get dressed in the morning. But she will eventually become the target of the court’s gossip herself when it takes seven passionless years for her and her husband to have a child, and again when she has an affair with a hunky Swedish count (Jamie Dornan).

Mostly she feels isolated — a sensation Coppola explored movingly in “Lost in Translation,” which earned her a best-screenplay Oscar. A sweet sense of longing lingers throughout the picture; even when Marie and her friends joyously sprint through the garden to greet the sunrise on her 18th birthday, champagne glasses in hand, the moment is tinged with melancholy.

The scene is vividly emblematic of what Coppola does best: She transports you to a place you’ve never been, makes you feel a sensation that’s familiar, yet leaves you different than you were two hours earlier.

If you’d prefer a history lesson, watch a PBS documentary instead.

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