As I am trying to make customary here on this blog, I have chosen to review a film not in the regular prose I used at the
Loyolan and with which I have oddly grown bored, but in a far more bullet-point stream-of-consciousness manner. I feel this way better shows the workings of my mind--as I intend for this blog to completely or at least moderately capture such things--and, really, I think it makes it more interesting. Just get to the point already.
Marie Antoinette-I was quite dreading actually watching this film, as I find Sofia Coppola to be mildly overrated, but I also went into it really
really wanting to love it. I don't know if it was the desire to perhaps understand a film better than the undeserving mob that booed the film this May at Cannes, but it certainly wasn't for the reason that I simply like to enjoy everything, as I was keenly aware that any film about French aristocracy was unlikely to really enthrall me. As I watched the film, I found myself sort of eerily drifting in and out of boredom and yet still realizing that the way the film is made is actually quite bold. I didn't enjoy it, but I ended up greatly admiring it.
-The first 20 minutes seem to struggle with establishing any form of connection between the audience and the mostly thin plot. It appears to want to care about characters, and yet Marie is the only one that vaguely resembles a human. I understand Sofia's point (as evidenced heavily by the above poster, which I feel is grossly underrated) that Ms. Antoinette was this sort of naive young teenager whose transformation into this much-maligned glamour queen is a symbol of post-modernism and no different than the heiresses and fanciful partygoers of the modern age. This point could just as easily have the story take place in Los Angeles, really. The reason that we find the regal traditional machinations of the royalty this Austrian duchess has entered so peculiar and alien is that Marie herself feels the exact same way. She must rid herself of all things Austrian (including her clothes, which gives us a nice rear shot of Ms. Dunst) to firmly establish this new friendship between France and Austria, and is momentarily horrified that she must leave her beloved pug (whom I believe was named Mopps) with her former entourage.
Really, though, I don't find the portrayal of boring, oddly detailed French ceremonies to be of much interest. After some time, these parts of the film grow tiresome. We get it. She's an outcast just as much as the sisters in Sofia's debut film
The Virgin Suicides. I feel that the filmmakers wanted me to believe that this was like dealing with Martians, but it's really not that extreme. It's more as if I found myself somehow thrust into the world of
Gone With the Wind. (And I can assure you, the first words out of my mouth in that situation would most likely be "Your fucking name is Ashley? You should probably go join the war effort before I punch you for being such a pussy.")
Really, though, it seems that Sofia was trying to make much of the film boring on purpose. I feel that this is what Terrence Malick does with all of his films, but they end up transcending cinema themselves with their dreamlike pacing and minutae. Sofia only ends up portraying the fact that since she doesn't care to make it interesting, we shouldn't be interesting in experiencing it.
-The choice to not show Marie's infamous beheading originally angered me to no end when I heard about it, but once again it goes along with Sofia's journey into the heart and soul of this young and misunderstood creature. We see her give up during the film's final few minutes, and watching an empty shell would have actually been quite maddening to an interested audience member. Really, this film is not at all concerned with politics. The single funniest moment of the film (intentional or otherwise) comes with the mention of the American Revolution (which I dub "The War for Independence" in most cases because it sounds more noble, but I will refrain in case I confuse a reader with talk of the French Revolution). In a scant 60 seconds, one of Louis' advisers makes a brief point that funding the Americans would show England the power France possesses, and Louis immediately agrees. It is possibly the most streamlined decision to go to war e'er I saw, and it was received with a heartfelt guffaw.
This goes for the portrayal of Marie as well. Only in the last 20 minutes is any mention made of the French Revolution, and it is not put into context at any point. Most likely this is to show how isolated Marie was from the world around her, how she was completely unaware that her rich dessert lifestyle stood for everything wrong with the French monarchy and that this young girl was simply in a wrong place/wrong time situation. Really, the most rebellious thing she does during the film is applaud an opera at a court performance, which is something you just simply don't do I suppose.
This focus (or lack thereof) doesn't sound like it works, and I'm not entirely sure it does, but the choice is nevertheless interesting. I use the dialogue quote I did as the title of this article exclusively for the fact that it is one of the few truly thematic lines Marie delivers in the film, yet I cannot recall her ever saying it. I merely grabbed it from imdb.com.
-Much hubbub had been made about the film in regards to its soundtrack, which is a collection of 80s New Wave, pop and oddly enough The Strokes. Meant to portray both Marie's inner monologue and show that she is just an 80s party girl, it is actually the most un-noteworthy aspect of the film. It doesn't feel anachronistic simply for the fact that it would almost be stupid
not to do this and merely have obnoxious harpsichord tinkling for 120 minutes, which would contradict the whole post-modern angle. If anything, it galvanizes some of the film's editing, which when it's not showing fancy shoes and cakes to "I Want Candy" is actually quite pedestrian and a little lethargic.
I'm still very much split on the entire concept of an anachronistic soundtrack. I'm indifferent to it here, I love it in
A Knight's Tale and I absolutely despised the use of Maroon 5 in Natalie Villamonte's Del Rey Players version of
Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Then again, a lot of what passes for score these days (think Hans Zimmer, Howard Shore, James Horner) doesn't fit an era as much as a pre-established "movie score sound" that we've all oddly come to accept.
-I found myself staring at a lot of costumed bosoms, and "bosom" is a word I never use to describe that area of a woman's body lest I am quoting Cornershop's observation that "Everybody needs a bosom for a pillow," which I feel is a much more ingenious line than I think is credited.
-The choice to cast Molly Shannon as a woman of the court has been met with such malice by my acquaintances that I was pretty much went into the film expecting her to be in her SNL character that liked to keep on screaming "I'M FIFTY!" Really, though, she really makes no splash whatsoever as her character that I really don't care either way if she were cast or not.
-I appreciate the decision to have the actors not try to imitate any accent other than their own. I'd much rather see actors comfortable in their own speech than mangle a foreign tongue. This is one of the reasons
Amadeus is such a relatable movie.
-The few times I've seen Kirsten Dunst promote this film on television and in the news media, she has said that there is so little dialogue in the movie that it's almost a silent film. This is complete bullshit. There is plenty of dialogue here; more than
Spider-Man 2, probably. What is, in fact, true is that there is little dialogue
of consequence. Unlike other films about royalty, most of what is written and acted is supposedly realistic prattling, with only the dialogue used to discuss the passage of time and Marie's inability to fire up the loins of her impotent husband to be of any real interest.
The used phrase "silent movie" is intriguing, as this would have actually been a very appealing movie had the sound been taken out. During the final 15 minutes (as her world is falling apart) I believe only four lines of dialogue are uttered (not counting the mob's unimportant shouting) and two are only there to signify the end of the film. Otherwise, I think an audience going to see a film called
Marie Antoinette is intelligent enough to know what is going on without dialogue.
Besides, emotion and suggestion can be far more powerful. I recall seeing the French silent film
The Passion of Joan of Arc at the Zeum in downtown San Francisco, being the least troublesome of the films I've seen whose title contains the word "passion" (that number being two). The film focuses entirely on Joan's trial, the lead-up to the execution and the execution itself. (I saw this film as a part of Ron Chase's Art & Film organization, and I recall when we were asked what part we liked most, Stella sarcastically responded "The part when she cried.") During the trial scene, we see, through Joan's eyes, the elders discussing her heresy and her ultimate sentence, and the power in the scene is specifically for the fact that we have
no idea what they are saying. We as an audience immediately expect the worst. And since I am a horrible lip-reader, especially when those lips are speaking an entirely different language, I couldn't ruin this powerful instant for myself.
-I feel no need to address the costumes. Here's a much better article that will do that for me: http://www.newyorker.com/critics/content/articles/060925crat_atlarge
-As a bonus, there's a line, also from
The New Yorker, that I'd like to share with you, simply because I find it hilarious, addressing the "fairy tale nature" of the first 10 minutes of the film.
It even has a resident witch, the Comtesse de Noailles (Judy Davis), whose place at the head of the welcoming party is compromised by the fact that, after years at the French court, she is about as welcoming as a frozen hedgehog.
-I am also indifferent to Kirsten Dunst as an actress. Sometimes she impresses me while at other times I find her boring. Perhaps the most interesting thing about her is now no longer, as she and Jake Gyllenhaal have broken up. My college acquaintance Ben Wolpert, who heads the band Scarlet Grey and whose family allegedly bought Ms. Dunst's old house in the Valley, would have you believe she is an airhead who has an ADD-caliber sense of distraction when it comes to her cat, but as someone who interviewed her during the press day for
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, I would have you know that she is somewhat savvy and remarkably down-to-earth. A tad boring, to be sure, but she did the press rounds in a pair with Mark Ruffalo, who all things considered is exponentially more interesting of a person.
-In conclusion, I very much admired the film. But I certainly didn't fucking enjoy it. How could I after
Saw III showed me what happens to a body when its limbs are very slowly twisted.
Now it's time to recycle many bottles of Two-Buck Chuck and vote, as my absentee ballot is due in the mail tomorrow. (Leave it to me to wait until the last possible damn minute to try to change my world.)
Labels: France, Kirsten Dunst, Malick, Marie Antoinette, New Wave, Sofia Coppola, Zeum
