The more I watch this film, the more I think it is a brilliant, modern retake on the young Marie Antoinette. Where it fails is in the last third of the film, since the very young director Sophia Coppola did not have the courage (or perhaps the maturity) to depict Marie Antoinette as a grown-up, middle-aged queen, the true wife of Louis XVI and mother of their four children and eventually, of course, after the execution of her husband, the Widow Capet, as the revolutionaries so cruelly termed her.
But as a mood piece, as a tone piece, as an impressionistic piece about the young Marie Antoinette, it wins my respect. Also, I have to stand in its defense because I think it is an essentially very feminine film (in the same way that Coppola's father's film The Godfather is an essentially very masculine film). It manages to capture the beauty, grace and spirit of teenage girls. I liked it for that. I thought it was a good Bildungsroman for young girls, a "growing up" novel or movie, because it initiates them into the many disillusionments and pitfalls of adulthood, so many of them sexual and related to men and the power that men wield. The film is also simply a great pleasure to view - the scenes at Versailles and Le Petit Trianon are extraordinary, the scenery, the costumes, the hair, etc. There weren't as many historical inaccuracies as people are making out here (the few that there were mostly have to do with aristocrats addressing the king or queen before they are addressed by him/her first). In fact, Coppola obviously did an impressive amount of research. Antonia Fraser herself praised the results.
As for Kirsten Dunst, she often looks like Marie Antoinette, she has a similar profile (watch the very last scene again) and overall the same Germanic coloring (blonde, pale, blue-eyed) and build (slight). She certainly manages to embody MA's grace and is a far better incarnation of the tragic queen than poor dowdy Norma Shearer. I also have to say that Coppola completely won me over when she said that she was thinking of Adam Ant when it came time to costuming the character of the Queen's lover, Axel von Fersen. In the same way, the entire scene at the Paris Opera is absolutely spot-on... I can't think of any better soundtrack. Even my mother (born in 1939, hardly an Adam Ant or Siouxsie and the Banshees fan) thought it was very affecting. And beautifully shot. So there! New Romantics rave on!
