Marie Antoinette (2006)

August 7, 2023 8:49 AM

The retelling of France's iconic but ill-fated queen, Marie Antoinette. From her betrothal and marriage to Louis XVI at 14 to her reign as queen at 19 and to the end of her reign as queen, and ultimately the fall of Versailles.

Roger Ebert: "No, the picture is not informative and detailed about the actual politics of the period. That is because we are entirely within Marie's world. And it is contained within Versailles, which shuts out all external reality. It is a self-governing architectural island, like Kane's Xanadu, that shuts out politics, reality, poverty, society."

Peter Bradshaw: "It is indulgent, certainly, but there is a controlled brilliance to Coppola's opening scenes, in which Marie is taken from her homeland, spirited in a kind of diplomatic quarantine-ritual through a Royal tent straddling the Franco-Austrian border, and then appears at the crowded Versailles court, as alien as an astronaut."

Anthony Quinn: "Marie Antoinette is about confinement in a gilded cage, and, perversely or not, shows itself far more interested in the cage than in the prisoner."

Winner of the Best Costume Design Oscar and the Palm Dog at Cannes

57% on Rotten Tomatoes

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posted by Law of Demeter (1 comment total)

Oh, I just saw this for the first time last week. Dunst is very good and the performance evokes a lot of sympathy for MA... to begin with. After a certain point though the reinforcement of her entire purpose being to secure the alliance dehumanises her and coupled with the extravagant excesses the monarchy affords itself, by the end with the flaming torches outside the windows of the palace I found myself completely apathetic to her eventual fate.

I'm wondering if this is a 2023 perspective being applied though and how it landed at the time if anybody has that experience?
posted by Molesome at 8:42 AM on August 9, 2023