MOVIES

I saw an sneak preview of Flags of our Fathers on Sunday. It lingers with you, but wasn't a fantastic movie. The battle sequences were especially good, but the present day scenes read a little like the bad part of The Notebook.

MARIE ANTOINETTE
New Yorker

In May of this year, word came through of an unruly mob in France. “Did you hear what happened?” a friend asked me. “Marie Antoinette got heckled. Absolutely slaughtered.” This was news? The last time I checked, she got heckled from the neck up more than two hundred years ago. After a while, the confusion lifted. We were talking about the Cannes Film Festival, where Sofia Coppola’s film about the life of the late Queen, starring Kirsten Dunst, had been met with a trumpet blast of boos. Needless to say, my desire to watch the movie was doubled at a stroke. Anything that rattles the ashtrays of French film critics has got to be seen.

The first intimation that “Marie Antoinette” will not cleave to the habits of other period dramas comes in the opening credits, which roll to the sound of “Natural’s Not in It,” by the Gang of Four. That title more or less covers the world of the movie, in which regular human conduct—everything from choosing whom you marry to getting dressed in the morning—is torn from your control and codified to death. We start with the teen-aged Austrian princess arriving at the French border, in 1770, as the prospective bride of Louis, the Dauphin of France (Jason Schwartzman). She enters a tented pavilion, pitched in autumnal woods; it might as well be made from candy canes and gingerbread. It even has a resident witch, the Comtesse de Noailles (Judy Davis), whose place at the head of the welcoming party is compromised by the fact that, after years at the French court, she is about as welcoming as a frozen hedgehog. Marie, schooled in warmth, greets the Comtesse with something called a hug. Worse still, she goes on to console her Austrian entourage, from whom she must now take her leave, with a group hug. To the Comtesse and her posse, all this seems not so much shocking as incomprehensible. You might as well ask them to hip-hop.

The scene sets a pattern for the rest of the film. Our heroine finds the existence of the rich and royal, in pre-Revolutionary France, to be starched beyond all tolerance; over time, she exerts a softening, not to say trivializing, influence, and that, in turn, is one of the factors that hasten the Revolution’s rush. Certainly the trivia on show here would be more than enough to enrage the malnourished masses. We get wigs that look like desserts, cookies that look like jewels, and shoes—designed for the film by Manolo Blahnik—that appear to have been stitched together at night by the world’s most sophisticated elves. There is one pair of fur-lined slippers into which even Freud would blush to insert his toes.

If Marie Antoinette throws herself into footwear, so to speak, that may be because, elsewhere in life, she lacks the satisfaction of a snug fit. Her sole duty is to provide the Dauphin with a male heir, a task made more urgent when he ascends the throne, his rambunctious old goat of a father (Rip Torn) having died from smallpox. (This being a glamour-conscious picture, there is no sign of anything as gross as actual pox—I mean, eeewww.) The Dauphin, however, is a tidy dullard whose only pleasure is the study of locks and keys; again, the symbolism is hardly tucked away in a drawer. One night in Paris, the Queen, as she now is, attends a masked ball, her features utterly disguised by a thin strip of transparent black gauze. There, at last, she meets someone with the right-sized key: Count Fersen (Jamie Dornan), a leering Swede, and, if this film is to be believed, father to the sovereign bloodline of France.

But is this film to be believed? Manolo Blahnik, with his precise grip on fantasy, seems to be the only person to have recognized the project for the confection that it is. Coppola films Versailles with a flat acceptance, quickening at times into eager montage, and declares, in her notes on the film, that she sought to capture her heroine’s “inner experience.” Her what? This is like a manicurist claiming to capture the inner experience of your pinkie. The one, transfixing virtue of “Marie Antoinette” is its unembarrassed devotion to the superficial. There is no morality at play here, no agony other than boredom, and, until the last half hour, not a shred of political sense. The fun dies out of the film—in fact, the film itself expires—when Coppola suddenly starts dragging in discussions of the American Revolution and, at the close, a baying crowd with a hatred of chandeliers. I can see what the director was after here: the kind of irruptive shock that cuts short the jamboree in “Love’s Labor’s Lost.” But horrified realism is not her style, and her lunges at historical gravity seem insulting and uncourageous; she should have kept her nerve and stuck to the fripperies—to the noisy, brightly decorated void in which her characters spin.

The question has to be: what does Coppola know? Was “Lost in Translation” really, as it first appeared, a wistful commentary on the plight of Americans abroad, who shut themselves in their hotel rooms and fell lightly in love because it was sweeter, and less scary, than venturing outside? Or was it, as a later viewing suggested, in hock to that same trepidation, creating an insular chic out of xenophobia? A similar uncertainty pervades “Marie Antoinette,” borne along on a wave of anachronistic rock. Is the movie somehow contending that the Queen was, with her gang of cronies and her witless overspends, the Paris Hilton of the late eighteenth century? If so, then the catcallers of Cannes were even more misguided than they knew, since any decent French Marxist would be happy to deconstruct the film as a trashing of the idle rich.

On the other hand, I spent long periods of “Marie Antoinette” under the growing illusion that it was actually made by Paris Hilton. The exploits of Madame du Barry (Asia Argento), the old King’s mistress, are unpeeled with a schoolgirl’s sneer. “That is so Du Barry,” one of Marie’s pals says. Snuff is snorted like coke. There are hilarious attempts at landscape, but the fountains and parterres of Versailles are grabbed by the camera and pasted into the action, as if the whole thing were being shot on a cell phone and sent to friends. The young Queen builds a faux-pastoral paradise in the grounds, where she and her little daughter sport like shepherdesses, but, rather than raise an eyebrow at this make-believe, the director treats it as just another white-linen moment, like an outtake from “The Virgin Suicides,” and, for good measure, tosses in a few shots of nodding flowers and ickle bouncy lambs. That is so Coppola. It is hard to hate the film, whose silly fizz makes it simpler and less creepy than her earlier projects. If it does drop larger hints, they have less to do with the vanished culture of Versailles than with the fretful stasis of our own. The movie’s approach to the world beyond, to everything that one doesn’t know or wouldn’t care to buy, is like the look on Kirsten Dunst’s face: a beautiful blankness, forever on the brink of drifting, with a smile, into sleep.