Underestimating Marie Antoinette

Before I post my Marie Antoinette rant, let’s have a look at what my fellow bloggers had to say about the film:

From Cognitive:

More directors should try to convert historical epics or “dry boring” lit classics into pieces of well ”pop movies” like “pop art and pop music” to get the general population to tune in…one never knows what will come out of it!

So one person likes it.

But then from World Aesthetics:

Coppola recreates history, a new, groovy, glamourous history in which Marie Antoinette (or anyone) is not actually seen dead. Because Coppola focuses so much on making MA seem young and funky, and that’s just about it, it is hard to get past this dislocative sound and to see the film as something of reality/relevant… Coppola removes Marie Antoinette’s ability to own and control both her own voice and her body, filling her vocabulary with culturally and periodically jarring words like ‘ridiculous’, and never allowing us to be unaware that Marie Antoinette’s body is subjected and scrutinized, but rarely admired, by spectators.

My first thought was the suspicion that Eloise just plain hates movies (and possibly life/joy?). My second thought was that here we have two people, one who liked Marie Antoinette and one who hated it and I think they are both wrong and have a superficial understanding of the aesthetic regime employed by Sophia Coppola. They both have read the use of anachronistic music in the film as a marketing ploy, a way to sell history to the kiddies. If you wanted to make a film to reach the kiddies you’d be better of making Bratz films rather than force them to watch a historical piece. In other words, why spend the time putting peanut butter on celery when you can sell them a tub of butter? Smooth, smooth butter. And if your intention was to make Marie Antoinette young and funky would you really include leisurely paced (read slow) scenes of the Queen wandering aimlessly through gardens reading philosophy? No, this cannot be the intentions of Sophia Coppola.

This from The Forestry gets closer to my feelings on the film:

Coppola has not only breathed an air of contemporary existence into Marie Antoinette’s historical figures through the juxtaposition of two very different eras’ in time. She had reshaped a genre of historical past and fashioned it into a critique of the ‘present’.

However, I still feel this is reductionist in the way it reads the film in allegorical terms.

My favourite reading is from Life Out of Balance:

 As Cohen and Kennedy state in Global Sociology, “there can be no such thing as ‘authenticity’, only ideas which always need to be reinterpreted in the present”. The same goes for Marie Antoinette. It would be ludicrous to assume that a movie set in the past is completely free of modern influences, and it’s more pretentious to attempt a movie that is so clean. Every time we look at history, we interpret it – and it functionally changes.

Marie Antoinette’s aesthetic breaks down traditional historical narratives, reconfiguring “woman”, our concept of “Marie Antoinette”, how we perceive history. I’ll be expanding on this in my next post.