Sofia Coppola's "Marie Antoinette" is Still A Masterpiece 8 Years Later

"Lavish imagery and a daring soundtrack set this film apart from most period dramas; in fact, style takes precedence over plot and character development in Coppola's vision of the doomed queen."
- Rotten Tomatoes' consensus of Marie Antoinette.

Riding high off of explosive critical acclaim for her Oscar winning film "Lost In Translation" (Coppola won Best Original Screenplay, and was also nominated for Best Director, the 3rd woman ever to be recognized in that category) expectations were high for her next project. It's fair to say, the expectations themselves were unreachable; no matter what Coppola did, it would have been unfairly held next to Lost In Translation and picked apart for not being as good.

So when "Marie Antoinette" premiered at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, the tepid reaction was (in a sense) predictable. The film was given a limited release and expanded, and then underperformed. Though it won an Oscar for Best Costume Design, it was quickly forgotten about and dismissed as a "failure".

When I first watched the film in middle school, I recall being dazzled in a way that no film had dazzled me before. Yes, the imagery was gorgeous (as it always is in a Sofia Coppola film). But what truly enchanted me the most was the innovative storytelling. With Marie Antoinette, Sofia Coppola takes the dull biopic genre and turns it upside down, taking a whole new approach to telling the story of the doomed Austrian princess turned French Queen.

The problem with biopics (recall films like "The Iron Lady" or Clint Eastwood's messy "J.Edgar") is that they become less about the famous person being studied, and more about a recollection of notable events edited together with some "Oscar worthy" clips that call on an actor to do nothing more than merely imitate. In doing so, the film feels like nothing more than a dramatized SNL skit, minus humor.

Coppola takes the story of Marie Antoinette, and strips it down. Though we do watch her deal with historical events (such as the march upon the royal palace of Versailles, or the storming of the Bastille), Coppola forgoes many of the historical contexts and myths associated with the young queen. For the first time, we see this almost legendary figure for what she truly was, an alienated teenage girl dealing with the massive amounts of unfair expectations placed upon her.  In an effort to paint this idea a little more vibrantly, Coppola transforms the royal court of Versailles into high school (more or less), with Kirsten Dunst's Queen Antoinette in the role of Cady Heron from Mean Girls. The film's soundtrack is even mixed with some modern music, while there's a shot of a Chuck Taylor Converse shoe during a scene in which Antoinette is trying on heels to buy.

In a sense, this film is no different than Coppola's previous works. It's the 3rd film in which she studies the loneliness of being a female. The royal French court as the setting of the study lends itself to the material. Antoinette is a woman that is used, but never once valued or understood. She is constantly told by everyone around her (including her Austrian mother, via letters) what she is, and what she must do. From the moment she sets foot in France, she is labeled as a "traitor", a "cold Austrian" and is constantly left out of group discussions. Even her ladies in waiting keep their distance, walking behind the queen as she navigates the gorgeously sprawling palace grounds, surrounded by gossip in a scene that recalls Lindsay Lohan's Cady trying to find a table to sit at during lunchtime.

Critics were expecting a more "textbook" approach to the story of Marie Antoinette. What they received, however, was the story of the woman behind the title of Marie Antoinette, affectionately called Antoine by her mother. At the age of 14, she was taken from everything she knew, and placed in the unfamiliar world of the French aristocracy. Rather than go down a checklist and recount the historical details, we learn more about the woman; Coppola's story is a beautiful testimony to the way women were treated (and undervalued) at this time in history, and portrays the young monarch in a light that no one had seen previously. We all hear about the lavishly spoiled woman who said the words "Let them eat cake," ignoring the pleas of the starving people who were suffering at the expense of the upper class. Never once have we seen the girl behind the cruel myths, the girl who stood tall amongst a sea of people trying to grab onto her and hold her down, people that would've given a limb to see her fall. Antoinette was a girl brought in as a pawn, for the pleasure of the potential king, mistreated, and then executed to relinquish the guilt of the very people who propped her up into the role of Queen of France.

Much like the woman the Coppola centers around, the film was severely misunderstood by critics and moviegoers alike. However, Marie Antoinette is a film that holds up very well upon re-watching, and it continues to dazzle and sparkle as brightly as it did the very first time I watched it, 8 years ago.