I've just come from seeing Marie Antoinette with a very angry audience. The film moves like the sea; Dresses, packs of dogs, tall grass -- everything moves like the ocean and no one quite understands that that terrible feeling they are having is drowning.
As a film, it's rather flawed, although entirely internally consistent to its vision, but the feeling it leaves you with -- that is really something. I marvelled, so many times while watching it, how it taps into that feeling of experiencing the world as if no one ever has in quite the same way with quite the same intensity. There are so many moments of drunken friends pushing past what Anne Rice named "The Golden Moment" and you do feel for them -- as it takes more and more to have less and less fun and comment wittily on it. There's a moment, at a costume ball, dancers whirling to Siouxsie's Hong Kong Gardens and I wondered desperately what it looked like to people who were not me, who had not danced to this song in a club with a room quite rightly called The Versailles Room and people dressed in panniers, powdered wigs and frock coats in distress. What was this movie, I wondered, to people who felt no such call to these things other than to call them pretty?
Sofia Coppola has this knack for portraying loneliness amongst crowds and splendor and loss as delineated by her characters' broad, if not expansive, imaginations. There are moments in the film where you know the characters are watching themselves, where they are thinking "and all nights should be as this night" when even that night is not truly as they would wish it. Sometimes, it made me think of prom.
There were multiple moments in the film where I burst into tears, a given shot was so perfectly paired with a bit of music. Sofia Coppola and I are about the same age, and maybe that's what it takes to really, really dig the music, but I hope not.
I also must take a moment to give kudos to the sound editors and mixers. The ambient sound on this is astounding and is perhaps the most signigicant factor in creating the feeling of tension that is the insular world of the French court.
So: My Angry Audience. People laughed. People yelled at the screen. People yelled at other audience members whom they didn't know. People snored; people stormed out. It is not that I don't think it is reasonable to hate this film -- some people, some smart, engaged, imaginative people will loathe this film. But people took this one personally. They seemed affronted, insisting that no one talked about sex openly then (they didn't wear all those clothes to minimize sexuality; quite the contrary) or that young monarchs would never so drink and party. They dubbed a daydream sequence of Marie's over the top (that was the point -- she's a teenage girl!) and raged about the music. Were they angry merely because they did not get their nice, neat and dry historical costume drama? Or were they angry because they felt trapped outside the film's world? I don't know. But they were angry. It was sort of horrifying.
Marie Antoinette is not the story of the French Revolution. Nor is it any sort of cautionary or moral tale or even a grand feminist statement. Merely, it is the noisy, disjointed journal of a dying world and those carried down by its weight. It is not about guilt or innocence, morals or compassion, merely the notion that the end of all things, of any things, is always sad.
I thought it was lovely, but perhaps you have to have a penchant for the cruelties of restriction, the finer points of protocol and the idea that you can will the night longer and the morning clearer, no matter how many times the very attempt of such an act has failed you.
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