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Marie Antoinette (2006), Sofia Coppola. Apr. 13, 7pm. View count: One.
I am deeply sorry that I sat through this movie.
A better actor than Kirsten Dunst could have saved it, and a better editor could have, and surely a better director could have, but none of these things was present.
I'm strongly leaning toward the editing as the worst culprit here; seldom, seldom was anything worth looking at, anything well-composed and interesting, ever lingered upon. Only the most dull shots were given time to sink in. Anything good was cut to pieces. Ill-considered jump cuts, singly or in twos. The pacing was appalling, all long lingering shots on nothing in particular immediately followed by a lot of fast action that no one could care about. It was neither a deliberately paced movie punctuated by quick bursts of faster shots nor an MTV stereotype, all wacky angles and cutting all the time to whatever will hold still; instead it sort of tried to be both, which was of course horrible.
Also bad, however, was the screenwriting. Kirsten Dunst didn't get any sort of character stroke until thirty minutes into the movie (unless you consider liking a dog a little bit a character stroke), and was completely opaque and empty-headedly without any sort of motivation until three-fourths of the way through. And after that she went right back to being her old blank-slate self. I had no idea whether she was a power-hungry schemer or a Disney Princess (TM) until at least halfway through (when I realised she was much more boring than either: she was a party-loving Debbie who was also nice all the time).
We'd have long shots of people, doing things, but we wouldn't really know anything about them. Yep, that guy sure is riding a horse. Yep, I think that's one of her ladies in waiting, maybe? For some reason Kirsten Dunst was shown repeatedly walking down a hall in Versailles, and I have no idea where that hall was supposed to lead. People would never set out to go places, they would only appear there, with no intent beforehand, no ease-out or -in to make their actions more coherent.
And, oh, the visited and revisited party scenes. So thoroughly empty yet numerous that I started fast-forwarding through them. Kirsten Dunst was successfully set up, by this point, as a Mary Sue for all those grade-school girls who wrote 'I want to be famous' in the blank for their 'what do you want to be when you grow up?' question. We're supposed to feel annoyed at the court officials who try to stop her from overspending, I think. How could they stand in her way? All she wants is shoes and pastries. I guess. I couldn't really tell you what she wants, as it's never even brought up. (Briefly it's brought up that she seems to want the Other Man, but the movie's more interested in making us look at jump-cut shots of Kirsten Dunst lying on a bed and looking moony than anything more artful, and then it's simply dropped. I guess she didn't care all that much?)
I'm unclear on whether her profligate spending of France's money is supposed to cause the eventual rebellion against the aristocracy, in this, but if so, that would condense the movie's concept down pretty well (Power is fun! I guess it was all worth it, whatever 'it' was!). The Rebel Threat doesn't happen until the last ten minutes of the movie, and it's probably the only even vaguely interesting part. (There were two cute little bits of this movie, one where some servant cleans a hen's eggs before Kirsten Dunst's child is brought to see them, and one where the absence of a family member is conveyed by that family member being painted out of a painting. That's it, really. Oh, also nice was that Bill Lee's wife from Naked Lunch was in it. She did fine, at least.)
Having Barry Lyndon in recent memory really makes this film sort of shrivel up and die. Even this Annie Lennox video is better-handled, better-acted, better-edited, and better-LIT, for pete's sake. It even covers, successfully, the marriage of 'modern' music and Versailles-era court themes, which is never brought together in Marie Antoinette (the music feels like a substitution for character development, my least-favorite kind of soundtrack-movie; and it parallels the arbitrary, jarring range of accents and attitudes the characters have). If Annie Lennox had had the guts to have her character throw herself off a parapet at the end of the video I would be even more pleased with it, but, hey. Regardless. Watch and learn, Sofia Coppola.
I am deeply sorry that I sat through this movie.
A better actor than Kirsten Dunst could have saved it, and a better editor could have, and surely a better director could have, but none of these things was present.
I'm strongly leaning toward the editing as the worst culprit here; seldom, seldom was anything worth looking at, anything well-composed and interesting, ever lingered upon. Only the most dull shots were given time to sink in. Anything good was cut to pieces. Ill-considered jump cuts, singly or in twos. The pacing was appalling, all long lingering shots on nothing in particular immediately followed by a lot of fast action that no one could care about. It was neither a deliberately paced movie punctuated by quick bursts of faster shots nor an MTV stereotype, all wacky angles and cutting all the time to whatever will hold still; instead it sort of tried to be both, which was of course horrible.
Also bad, however, was the screenwriting. Kirsten Dunst didn't get any sort of character stroke until thirty minutes into the movie (unless you consider liking a dog a little bit a character stroke), and was completely opaque and empty-headedly without any sort of motivation until three-fourths of the way through. And after that she went right back to being her old blank-slate self. I had no idea whether she was a power-hungry schemer or a Disney Princess (TM) until at least halfway through (when I realised she was much more boring than either: she was a party-loving Debbie who was also nice all the time).
We'd have long shots of people, doing things, but we wouldn't really know anything about them. Yep, that guy sure is riding a horse. Yep, I think that's one of her ladies in waiting, maybe? For some reason Kirsten Dunst was shown repeatedly walking down a hall in Versailles, and I have no idea where that hall was supposed to lead. People would never set out to go places, they would only appear there, with no intent beforehand, no ease-out or -in to make their actions more coherent.
And, oh, the visited and revisited party scenes. So thoroughly empty yet numerous that I started fast-forwarding through them. Kirsten Dunst was successfully set up, by this point, as a Mary Sue for all those grade-school girls who wrote 'I want to be famous' in the blank for their 'what do you want to be when you grow up?' question. We're supposed to feel annoyed at the court officials who try to stop her from overspending, I think. How could they stand in her way? All she wants is shoes and pastries. I guess. I couldn't really tell you what she wants, as it's never even brought up. (Briefly it's brought up that she seems to want the Other Man, but the movie's more interested in making us look at jump-cut shots of Kirsten Dunst lying on a bed and looking moony than anything more artful, and then it's simply dropped. I guess she didn't care all that much?)
I'm unclear on whether her profligate spending of France's money is supposed to cause the eventual rebellion against the aristocracy, in this, but if so, that would condense the movie's concept down pretty well (Power is fun! I guess it was all worth it, whatever 'it' was!). The Rebel Threat doesn't happen until the last ten minutes of the movie, and it's probably the only even vaguely interesting part. (There were two cute little bits of this movie, one where some servant cleans a hen's eggs before Kirsten Dunst's child is brought to see them, and one where the absence of a family member is conveyed by that family member being painted out of a painting. That's it, really. Oh, also nice was that Bill Lee's wife from Naked Lunch was in it. She did fine, at least.)
Having Barry Lyndon in recent memory really makes this film sort of shrivel up and die. Even this Annie Lennox video is better-handled, better-acted, better-edited, and better-LIT, for pete's sake. It even covers, successfully, the marriage of 'modern' music and Versailles-era court themes, which is never brought together in Marie Antoinette (the music feels like a substitution for character development, my least-favorite kind of soundtrack-movie; and it parallels the arbitrary, jarring range of accents and attitudes the characters have). If Annie Lennox had had the guts to have her character throw herself off a parapet at the end of the video I would be even more pleased with it, but, hey. Regardless. Watch and learn, Sofia Coppola.
