Marie Antoinette
Here’s this lavish film full of mouth-watering period costumes and gorgeous on-location shots of Versailles, broken at random points with contemporary slang (”Wow!”), imagery (coke-snorting), and ’80s music. What’s up with that? I think I understand what Coppola wanted to do — make Marie Antoinette’s life relevant to teens and 20somethings — but if so, why did she make so much of it so bloody long and dull? I started fast-forwarding through the movie shortly after the construction of Trianon, slowing down only at the start of the Revolution.
I think if Marie Antoinette had been either pure period or pure genre-bending pop froth, I would have been happy, but the combination of the two just didn’t work for me. For a few scenes, like the bubbly shopping/sweets montage or Marie Antoinette’s birthday party (Woman to man in tall white wig: “I love your hair! What’s going on there?” Man: “Everything“), it came close to working as silliness, and for more scenes, like the exquisitely accurate details about dressing each morning in front of an audience, it worked as historical drama. But mostly it was about 40 minutes too long, and not even the St. Cyr and Exalt Evantine in me could stay fixated on the clothes long enough keep my thumb off the FF button….
drupagliassotti @ May 1, 2007