"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.
