Marie Antoinette
Directed by Sofia Coppola
Sofia Coppola began her writing career at the age of 17 as the coauthor of “Life Without Zoe,” a 30-minute film her father, Francis Ford Coppola, directed as part of a 1989 anthology called New York Stories. It’s the plotless tale of a happy little rich girl named Zoe who lives in the Sherry-Netherland Hotel and rallies her rich little friends with the cry, “Let’s go shopping!” Everybody loves Zoe, from the elevator man to the doorman to the homeless man who lives in a carton down the block.
A shameless ripoff of Kay Thompson’s Eloise, down to the theft of a hotel location and even the intersection at which Thompson’s 6-year-old lived (the Sherry-Netherland sits across Fifth Avenue from Eloise’s home in the Plaza), “Life Without Zoe” seems intended to celebrate the exuberant innocence of Sofia’s own childhood. It fails, and fails spectacularly, because there’s nothing exuberant or innocent about Zoe’s relentless materialism. Evidently Coppola found his daughter’s hunger to shop, shop, shop so charming as to be worthy of celluloid immortality, but “Life Without Zoe” demonstrates that daddies aren’t always the best judges of their daughter’s questionable charms.
“Life Without Zoe” is only of retrospective value because it offers a guide to the inexplicably celebrated work of Sofia Coppola, who deserves an august spot on the short list of most overrated writer-directors in Hollywood history. Two years ago she won an Oscar for a screenplay to a movie called Lost in Translation that had no narrative line, no defined characters, and very little dialogue. She was nominated for her direction of the film as well, which was certainly a very nice feather in her cap but probably a little galling for the Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-Wai, whose very individual style Coppola appropriated for her endless travelogue of Tokyo.
Lost in Translation was her second film. Her first, The Virgin Suicides, is about five sisters who kill themselves for no particular reason except to look lovely in their diaphanous dresses as they jump from a roof. Coppola is a fashion designer as well as a filmmaker, and her camera fetishizes clothing the way porn fetishizes the naked body–in the most blunt way possible, leaving nothing whatsoever to the imagination.
Now, with her third film, Coppola has come full circle. There is a profound connection between the let’s-go-shopping sensibility expressed in “Life Without Zoe” and the let-them-eat-cake sensibility expressed in her newest film, Marie Antoinette. Coppola’s Marie Antoinette is a movie about Marie Antoinette that could have been made by Marie Antoinette. Or by Zoe.
Just like Zoe, Marie (Kirsten Dunst) is a teenager living in a grand setting without her parents. On the one hand, Versailles is a strange and cold place where people watch her getting dressed in the morning. On the other hand, the furniture and the wall décor are magnificent. (Coppola got permission to shoot in and around the actual Palace of Versailles.) After a period of adjustment, Marie gets to spend her days picking out shoes and wigs and dresses.
Marie doesn’t shout “Let’s go shopping,” but she might just as well. As writer-director, Coppola basically does the shouting for Marie Antoinette, since her movie only comes alive in these sequences. As a fashion designer, she lingers over the bends and folds and creases in fabrics and leathers as though she’s selling them to us. Marie and her bubbly friends giggle and smile as the catchy pop tune “I Want Candy” plays on the soundtrack. They eat bonbons and bring some vim and vigor to the starchy and uptight world of the French court.
Throughout Marie Antoinette, Coppola draws a parallel between one of history’s most controversial women and the soon-to-be-forgotten famous-for-being-famous starlets of our day, whose hijinks are featured weekly on the covers of People and Us Weekly. Coppola’s Marie is Jessica Simpson crossed with Paris Hilton crossed with Lindsay Lohan. And make no mistake: Coppola is on Jessica-Paris-Lindsay’s side. After all, who knows better about the savagery to which gossips can subject a sweet young thing? When Sofia’s father cast his beloved daughter as Michael Corleone’s beloved daughter in Godfather III, she was tarred, feathered, and pilloried for her amateurish performance.
Surely Coppola experienced some sense of fellowship upon learning the details of Marie Antoinette’s life: She was married off at 14 by her empress-mother to a 15-year-old for the sole purpose of giving birth to an heir to the French throne who would solidify the bond between Austria and France, only to become the object of scorn and censure because no heir was produced for many years. Sofia was an 18-year-old Hollywood princess when Francis told her to take over the part Winona Ryder had fled in the most anticipated film in years. She was just doing what her royal daddy told her to do to save his epic, and found herself raked over the coals when she never sought to be an actress in the first place.
The problem with Sofia’s clear identification with Marie is this: Godfather III is a movie; France is a country. Godfather III failed at the box office. The misconduct of Marie Antoinette and her husband, Louis XVI, helped bring about the most disastrous experiment in violent social change the world had ever seen.
You would hardly know that the reign of Louis XVI was a time of political, ideological, and social ferment in France. In the last 15 minutes of Marie Antoinette, a mob suddenly appears at the gates of Versailles screaming and throwing things. Why have they come? Judging from the tone of Coppola’s movie, a contemporary audience would be excused for thinking a bunch of French teenagers had sent each other instant messages informing everybody there was going to be a rave in the Versailles basement. And then got mad when the guards told them the party had been called off.
The French Revolution is depicted as follows: a room in Versailles where the chandelier has been smashed on the floor. For Sofia Coppola, apparently, the destruction of quality crystal is a horror beyond imagining. Nothing more needs to be said. As for me, I’m, like, you know, whatever.
John Podhoretz is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.
