Let Them Be Bored (Marie Antoinette (DVD))

Member Name: JayHall1991

Product:	Marie Antoinette (DVD)
Date:	11/05/08 (70 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: It Looks Amazing, Has A Sense Of Fun

Disadvantages: Uneven, Bad Pacing and Very One Dimensional

Marie Antoinette is leaving Austria to become the future Queen of France, a title which she seems ill at ease with and a life style to which she is not accustomed. But it is making her the toast of her home country, the joy of her mother and the relief between a possible Austrian-France conflict. When she is introduced to Versailles and her new husband, she doesn't at first fit into the scenery, with vicious gossip spreading about her and an inability to arouse the future King. With the chances of her bringing France a new Prince seeming slight, her position seems unsecure - so she throws herself into the extravagant and lavish Parisian routine. But trouble is brewing as the people of France are beginning to starve due to huge economic instability and unemployment - their calling for a revolution and an end to the upper classes way of living.

Marie Antoinette is a sparkling, shimmering, colourful affair - a historical portrait of an over-indulgent time that offers buckets of aesthetic joy and compulsive detail but lacks any form of emotional substance or true entertainment. It's beautiful, eye catching and engagingly stylish, but collapses under its own weight - its frivolousness causes the audience to disengage with the plot, and its paper-thin character development makes the whole thing feel pointless and redundant. Despite its visual prowess, the film feels heavy and cumbersome, replacing graceful story telling with obvious button pressing and the performances fail to bring any interest to the -elaborately decorated- plate. It's a drippy, pretty, silly, irritating, impulsively enjoyable failure - the cinematic equivalent of the oxymoron 'pretty ugly'- a raving monster without any constraints, too shallow to be memorable but fascinating as an artistic experiment.

Marie Antoinette is a very frustrating movie; the shadow of what it could have been looms over every scene like a spirit because it never reaches its potential, each scene lacks emotional impact and is happy to pile on more unnecessary frivolity. The film feels dead, for all its lively backing music and colour it never has a beating heart - its characters never feel real, their pain doesn't become ours, their laughter doesn't fill the air, their loves don't charm, their desire don't seduce... it simply doesn't leap off the screen. Sophia Coppola directs without any passion, this doesn't seem like a product out of love for the subject, or even curiosity - she seems to think that pairing back all emotion, character development and subtlety makes the film more satisfying, but it just doesn't. Anything that could be interesting is skipped, we don't learn anything about the title character - she isn't turned into an identifiable figure and the people around her are treated as disposables. There isn't one moment that's memorable throughout the whole thing, it's all surface and no depth and so for all its sweetness it can't help but leave a bitter taste in your mouth.

This is a beautifully made movie from a visual standpoint; the costumes are incredible, the set pieces are immaculately produced, the camera-work is elegant, the colour palette is incredibly comprehensive and the style is an interesting clash of modern and old sensibilities. Versailles looks incredible, everything is sensually reproduced which gives the film a much needed sense of realism and weight whilst drawing your attention away from the increasingly boring plotline. The camera work is incredible, all enticing close ups and pensive pan out; giving a frantic yet dreamy pace to the whole thing which really emphasises the over- indulgent nature of the situation whilst adding an aspect of prettiness against the character's ugly actions. Coppola makes up for her lack of substance by including a huge amount of style, she direct with visual aplomp and panache, crafting some stunning montage sequences that shine with creativity and uses the fantastic set pieces to stage an amazing ball scene. Her pop art sensibilities mix well with the themes of the film and make the film feel fresher when mixed with the modern/up-tempo soundtrack.

Kirsten Dunst does her best, but she doesn't have the screen presence to pull the shallow character off and she does little to inject any emotional resonance to the whole thing. Some of her scenes feel very forced, like she doesn't understand what is happening around her and she never conveys the sadness or unease of the historic figure. There is something very constrained about her performance, she never gives too much away and has an unnatural chemistry with the supporting players. When the script switches gear to showing Antoinette on the brink of the French Revolution she does better work; she conveys the strength and determination of the character well and shows a sense of fear which is fairly moving. But still, there is little for her to cling onto when the script is at its most frivolous. She isn't dominating enough to capture your attention which makes it hard to connect with the character's journey.

The screenplay is where the film really falls down; it just doesn't offer anything of true excitement or pleasure, all the juicy bits are skipped in place of focussing solely on the title characters increasingly extravagant lifestyle. As an audience you feel detached from the whole thing as there is very little substance and the dialogue is at times laughably simplistic. The relationship between Antoinette and the King is dreadfully represented; they form no emotional bond and they have very little screen time together - theirs could have been the relationship to anchor the film and give it at least a little heart, but the superficial nature of the screenplay snubs it. The writer has no sense of pacing - writing unnecessarily long scenes that add little to the proceedings and constantly goes for emotional button pushing as opposed to creating thoughtful drama. The conclusion is unforgivably anti-climactic - the idea could have been haunting and sparse, but in writing without any passion or technical grace, it leaves the audience with a hollow feeling and there is very little emotional impact. We don't get a sense of the lead character as a human - she isn't given any interesting characteristics or identifiable emotions, she's a cold fish regardless of the emotional stage in her life.

However, Marie Antoinette adopts a certain sense of fun which remains intact throughout and makes the piece fizz at its most stylised moments. The soundtrack is a lot of fun with a cool mix of 80s electro pop, cool punk and sweeping orchestral pieces and there is a certain amount of energy to the film that makes it more entertaining than it should be. The dreamy/languid pacing of the summer scenes is very evocative and really adds texture and contrast to the film when compared to the more frantic sequences set in Versailles. When seen as a snap-shot of a lifestyle (or even a piece of art) rather than a film, it is triumphant; it encapsulates the lavishness perfectly and does have a certain old world style that is very effective. It's very beautiful in shorts burst and despite frequent slow stretches it does amuse with its vibrant, over the top attitude and graceful looks.

Marie Antoinette isn't a very good movie; the showy visuals and elegant styling's aren't enough to make up for the fact that it is a film placed firmly on a rather flimsy script and is directed with the passion of a wet lettuce. It's all dressed up with no-where to go, a pretty face without a brain - it's lacks any substance or emotion to tack onto its looks, so it eventually falls apart under its own weight.

Summary: An underdeveloped, beautiful mess