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Queen BeesSofia Coppola and Marie Antoinette have a lot in common.

By Dana StevensPosted Thursday, Oct. 19, 2006, at 6:06 PM ET

Listen to Dana Stevens' Spoiler Special about Marie Antoinette by clicking the arrow on the player below:

Kirsten Dunst in Marie AntoinetteSofia Coppola is the Veruca Salt of American filmmakers. She's the privileged little girl in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory whose father, a nut tycoon, makes sure his daughter wins a golden ticket to the Willie Wonka factory by buying up countless Wonka bars, which his workers methodically unwrap till they find the prize. If Coppola's 2004 Academy Award for best original screenplay for Lost in Translation was her golden ticket to big-budget filmmaking, Marie Antoinette is her prize, a $40 million tour through the lush and hallucinatory candy land of 18^th-century France. Of course, Roald Dahl's insufferable Veruca Salt was eventually seized by angry squirrels and hurled down a garbage chute. Will Coppola suffer a similar fate when Marie Antoinette opens this Friday?

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The film was simultaneously booed and given a standing ovation at Cannes, and reviews have been not just mixed but fiercely divided. Like licorice, Marie Antoinette is a confection you either love or hate, and both affects seem tied to your feeling about the director herself and her apparent identification with Louis XVI's bride. For my part, I can definitely say that I love licorice and hate Marie Antoinette. But I'm still wrestling with the enigma of Sofia Coppola.

Given the film's cavalier treatment of their country's history, French critics, understandably, head up the haters' brigade. Agnès Poirier, the London correspondent for Libération, scoffs, "There are two things [Coppola] likes, dresses and pudding. ... Cinema is for Coppola a mirror in which she looks at herself, not a mirror she holds to the world." But many critics on both sides of the Atlantic defend the film, in indulgent language that often seems to apply to its creator as well. To Entertainment Weekly's Lisa Schwarzbaum, Marie Antoinette is "the work of a mature filmmaker who has identified and developed a new cinematic vocabulary to describe a new breed of post-postpostfeminist woman." (The triple negative threw me for a minute, but I think she means "not feminist.")

To be fair, dresses and pudding are perfectly lovely things to contemplate, and Marie Antoinette makes them look exquisitely desirable. It does the same for lingerie, upholstery, wigs, babies, and sheep. What's impossible to tell is what, if anything, this film has to say about its objects of desire, its subject herself, the waning years of the French aristocracy, or the present day. That Kirsten Dunst's dimples are irresistible? That lavender and turquoise look good together? That it's really fun to have unlimited amounts of cash?

There's no question that making movies is, at least in part, always a matter of shopping. A director must select, and find a way to pay for, the right cast, the right music, the right cinematographer. And, as this recent piece in the Times travel section shows, Sofia Coppola is a peerless shopper. The movie's signature set piece is a montage of Louis-heeled Manolo Blahnik shoes in Easter-egg colors, filmed in fetishistic close-up to the strains of Bow Wow Wow singing "I Want Candy." It's exhilarating in the style of a high-end television commercial or magazine fashion spread. But, by linking the excesses of the French court of the 1780s with the pop culture of the 1980s, does Coppola intend to suggest that we're overdue for another revolution? Or just that, then as now, les filles just want to have fun?

If you follow Sofia Coppola's press coverage for a while (a project not recommended for those with a glucose intolerance), you'll read how Coppola manages to mystify and charm her interlocutors with trailing-off sentences and evasive mumbles. You'll also come across frequent admonitions from critics to "just go with it." It's as if she's the blushing rose of cinema, requiring protection from the harsh winds of unfavorable attention. References to her embarrassing casting as Mary Corleone in The Godfather, Part III (1990) invariably celebrate her fortitude in surviving the savagery of the film's reviews. But the negative critical response was justified; it's hard to think of a more amateurish performance in a major Hollywood release of the last two decades.

I'm not saying that Coppola is without talent as a director. She has a keen eye for composition, impeccable taste in music and fashion, and a nice sense of understatement. The Virgin Suicides was haunting, if slight, and Lost in Translation goes an amazingly long way on nothing but setting and mood. But it's possible to believe both things: that Coppola is a filmmaker of promise and that her path to success has been cushioned, not only by her place in the Coppola family, but by her own savvy image-management. She cultivates the persona of a shy, melancholy, and effortlessly glamorous girl wandering through a strange new world, bemused by the accolades heaped upon her—a persona that's replicated in the dreamy, glazed female protagonists of all three of her movies so far.

These qualities have seduced, among others, fashion designer Marc Jacobs, who named a handbag after Sofia (retail price $6,950) and made her the face for his Essence perfume. "If I were a girl," Jacobs has said, "I'd like to be Sofia. She's very feminine, and very quiet. I'm sure she works quite hard, but it all seems effortless." Doesn't it just? Sofia's father, Francis, named one of his Napa Valley sparkling wines after her: The label describes the beverage as "revolutionary, petulant, reactionary, ebullient, fragrant, cold, cool." At least one of those adjectives, "reactionary," might arguably sum up Marie Antoinette as well.

In a Vanity Fair profile last month, Evgenia Peretz wrote about the director's nontreatment of the rioting French proletariat in Marie Antoinette: "In neglecting them she has unwittingly taken a political stance." Unwittingly? It seems disingenuous to suggest that a movie about the fall of the French monarchy could be anything but political. I don't ask Coppola to be unsympathetic to the young queen, or even to devote any screen time to her arrest and decapitation. (The film ends abruptly as Jason Schwartzman's King Louis XVI and his queen flee Versailles in their royal coach after the storming of the Bastille.) But just because the film's heroine has nothing to say about politics, revolutionary or otherwise, doesn't justify Coppola being similarly dumbstruck.

"It's not like I'm a royalist," Coppola protested in a recent interview, when asked about her curiously blank take on the French Revolution. I'll take her word for it, but you'd never know it from the movie she's made, which is at least as nostalgic about the ancien régime as Gone With the Wind is about the antebellum South. Coppola's heroine lodges a similar protest in the film upon hearing about her alleged wish for the starving masses to nourish themselves on cake. "I would never say that!" the queen comments, shocked, to her ladies in waiting. According to the Antonia Fraser biography Marie Antoinette is based on, she never did say those actual words—but the rest of the film shows her as exactly the kind of person who would say them, so what's the difference?

Peretz's Vanity Fair profile begins with the kind of protective disclaimer that Sofia Coppola tends to evoke from journalists: "It might be tempting to dismiss Coppola as a ditz who has successfully parlayed her famous name, the right clothes, and the right friends into an overblown image." As a matter of fact, it is; so much so that, like Coppola's young queen faced with a Sèvres platter of Ladurée macaroons, I simply must give in to temptation.

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Dana Stevens is Slate's movie critic.

Photograph of Kirsten Dunst in Marie Antoinette by Leigh Johnson. Courtesy Sony Pictures Publicity.

COMMENTS

Remarks from the Fray:

Artists, it is said, keep coming back to the same subject over and over again, often in ways that are not readily apparent. For Coppola, apparently this core artistic inspiration is boredom and beauty. In the Virgin Suicides, what to do when you're bored and beautiful in the suburbs in the 1970s as one of many blond sisters: kill yourself. In Lost in Translation, what to do when you're bored and beautiful in Tokyo: find a rich old guy and sing karaoke. Now, in Mary Antoinette, what to do when you're bored and beautiful and unimaginably wealthy: party like it's 1789. Forgive me for saying, but I find it all rather, well, boring.

One way of looking at it, from the perspective of an artistic challenge, is that she tends to take the same big risk: how to create sympathy for the central character when the biggest conflict she faces is that she can't figure out what to do with all her beauty, money, whatever. Problem is, Coppola never really goes beyond relying on the audience to project themselves onto the heroine(s). Which apparently they do, probably because they're sitting through a Coppola film and therefore understand boredom.

--vanya

(To reply, click here.)

Stevens is a delight to read, but I've got to take issue with her critique of Coppola's new flick. It's clear she doesn't think much of either the director or the movie, but it's not really clear why. As a result, her examination, despite its unfavorable conclusions, has actually inadvertently piqued my curiosity about the movie. […]

By all accounts, the original Marie Antoinette had, much to her demise, a "curiously blank take" on the happenings of her country. If anything, that "neglecting" politics thing is probably anything but unwitting, and dare I suggest (without having seen the movie) it sounds like an almost trite attempt to strike some sort of harmony with Marie's reality.

Dana, and apparently many other critics, see narcissism in all that Coppola would do, and to some degree that may be true, but the description of Coppola's life and attitudes would seem to suggest at least a modicum of genuineness even with that narcissism. Like the universal mantra of writers (write what you know), Coppola is perhaps capitalizing on that which she likely knows very well; the sometimes charming, other times repugnant, coupling of naivety and privileged hedonism, oft mistaken as immoral and reckless aloofness by the piously vain who'd have a head for such antics.

Finally, Dana's most vehement criticism of the movie is its apparent lack of meaning. What the hell! It's art. I don't know about you all, but I prefer my entertainment and art without overt messages. […]

After Dana's write-up, who wouldn't want to see this movie now? I'd have to give it at least three stars already just because; A) it's non-political, B) it features an adorable and talented Kirsten Dunst, and, of course, C) because the French hate it!!

--popzealot

(To reply, click here.)

Finally, a reviewer gets it right about Sofia Coppola! Many's the time I've had to induce vomiting after reading a saccharine profile of this limp society girl with a knack for cinematography and not much else. Her films are always beautiful, and that's talent; but her writing is atrocious, and her direction doesn't so much bring the best out of her actresses as slap an extra coat of shellac on their spacy, glazed faces. Her post-postpostfeminist (or whatever) movies are all about celebrating the eerie distancing technique of "perfect" femininity, and if they say anything profound about their heroines, it's that each one desperately wishes she had something profound to say.

So far, she has hung each of her three films on a stylish milieu: The Virgin Suicides on a vaseline-smeared vision of the late seventies, Lost in Translation on wacky Japan, and now Marie Antoinette on the age of dressing-like-wedding-cakes. The tragedy is that Bill Murray, who wry self-direction made Lost in Translation watchable, didn't walk away with credit for the whole film. At least Marie Antoinette appears to have none of the pretensions that made Scarlett Johansson's character so nauseating. I don't mind going to a Coppola flick to eat cake, as long as it's clearly labelled "dessert".

--oedipa

(To reply, click here.)

Stevens' fluff piece purports to be a review, but its engagement with the actual film in question in virtually nil. What Dana actually delivers is a screed long on offended sensibilities and short on meaningful content. […]

Why should Sofia Coppola be singled out when it took the mainstream critical establishment 25 years to figure out that Emperor Spielberg had no artistic clothes ? Why is Coppola seen as receiving special treatment when Quentin Tarantino - who made a couple of slightly above average films but otherwise has made a (handsome) living out of (badly) interpreting Asian cinema to American pseudo-intellects - is allowed to coast by on his (undeserved) reputation and is somehow still being feted as a master filmmaker by the establishment elite? We're talking about a group of people (critics) who fawn over [Michael Moore], but now that a woman is the one receiving the undeserved accolades, we've got to tear her down, right?

--Planetary_Euology

(To reply, click here.)

Slate's subtle cultural snobbery—Sofia, but not Tori.

If you change the details of the characterization ever so slightly, Dana's piece could have been written about Tori Spelling.

But in fact, no equivalent piece about Tori will never appear at Slate.

Why? Because Sofia is "high culture" while Tori is not even kitsch - she's just fodder for the lumpenproletariat.

Stand up for Tori's right to be dinged as badly as Sofia cause she got where she did cause of her father.

Ain't this a democracy ????

--CartesianLinguist

(To reply, click here.)

(10/22)

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