How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken (10 page)

It's a measure of how greatly this little-girl-lost theme resonates with Coppola that the best parts of her new movie are those in which she frees herself from the conventions of standard film biographies and allows herself to imagine the inner life of a woman whose exterior—her image, her much-(and frequently mis-) reported words and deeds—we have come to know so well. Particularly at the beginning of the movie, there are scenes of great charm and freshness that suggest what it might have been like to be the immature and hapless object of so much imperial pomp. A sequence devoted to the progress of the young archduchess toward Versailles (the grand procession reduced here, no doubt for budgetary reasons, to two coaches) conveys the rather boring reality of that famous journey: you see Antoine looking out the window of her overdecorated coach at the seemingly endless parade of stark, early-spring trees (shades of
Lost in Translation
here); napping; desultorily playing cards with her ladies; gazing hopefully at a rather poignantly flattering miniature of her betrothed; and—best of all—amusing herself by breathing on the windows and doodling in the condensation of her own breath, a childish game as likely to have been played in 1770, you suddenly realize, as in 1970. At one point, in a plaintive child's voice, she asks the child's perennial question: “Are we there yet?” It's a wonderful touch.

These and certain other scenes of memorable visual effectiveness are rendered with a naturalness, a casualness even, rare in movies about great historical personages. A giddily cut montage, rather like something you'd see in a TV advertisement, of endless pairs of elaborate shoes (designed by Manolo Blahnik) nicely suggests the frenetic pleasure of addictive spending. (The sly inclusion of a pair of contemporary hi-top sneakers, in bubble-gum pink, is a visual analogue for the director's surprising but generally effective use of pop rather than period music for the sound track; you're reminded that whatever else these immature royals were, they were, at a certain level, just young people.) Imaginative re-creations of, say, the tedious cleaning-up process following a royal debauch—the unpleasant mess of half-eaten pastries and sticky spilled champagne—suggest a reality of life at Versailles you might not have seen before. Still other images wittily suggest the poor queen's fate: there's one shot of her in a bathtub in which the water comes precisely up to her neckline, and another at the theater in Paris in which her head is framed, again at the neckline, against a balcony.

 

Such moments nicely capture the interstices in the historical record—the episodes in daily life that must have taken place but of which there is, by now, the merest suggestion of the human reality that informed them. A scene of much charm, set in the Hameau, in which we see the queen engaging in what are clearly unscripted frolics among the flowers with her young daughter Marie-Thérèse, beautifully conveys the happy fulfillment that we know motherhood, and her special retreat, brought to Antoinette. As the little princess ambles about pointing to a little bee that has caught her imagination (“
la petite abeille, la petite abeille
!” the girl keeps crying), there's a telling sense of idle maternal contentment.

Tellingly, the linguistic anomaly of this scene—the American actress playing the French queen is speaking English, the little French actress playing the princess is speaking French—is of no concern to Coppola; the point here, as with so much of this film, is the heady and unexpected beauty of certain images, which so eloquently evoke privileged youth and guileless hedonism—the “sweetness of life” that, we are famously told by Talleyrand, those who did not live before the Revolution
can never know. The teenaged Antoinette's awed first exploration of her fabulous apartments at Versailles (her tentativeness nicely conveyed by the camera, which weaves and meanders as much as she does; never mind that the décor it records is all wrong for 1770); a somehow poignant shot merely of ladies' satin trains as they are dragged through the grass; a scene—at once giddy and strangely, ravishingly languid—in which the young royals, magnificently attired yet utterly youthful, race down a flight of steps in order to witness the sunrise: these linger in the mind long after the movie is over.

A quite different kind of emotion is expressed later on, silently but with equal potency, when the lovesick queen, coming from a final tryst with Fersen, who has to go off to war—perhaps inevitably, Coppola accepts the romantic story—returns to court from the Trianon. In a shot framed from a great distance, we see the tiny figure of the queen slowly, almost painfully ascending a magnificent flight of stone steps toward the palace, virtually dragging herself back to the life from which she cannot escape. Later on, alone in bed, she fantasizes about Fersen, a preposterous image of whom suddenly appears on screen: grimed with the dirt of battle, wrapped in an enormous billowing cloak, he sits astride a stallion that rears in slow motion—a hyperbolic picture that looks for all the world like the cover of a romance novel. Both times I saw the film the audience laughed nervously at this over-the-top image, but I thought it was right on target. Fersen, after all—so good-looking that he was known in London as “the Picture”—was described by contemporaries as looking like the hero of a novel, and Coppola has found the right imagery to convey his melodramatic allure. She has clearly done some homework.

 

One of the two great problems of the film is the sense you often get that she'd done her homework rather too faithfully: the languid freshness and visual originality of many scenes that seem evocative of Marie Antoinette's inner life stand in vivid contrast to the impression often given here, as it is in so many film biographies, that the narrative is often impatiently ticking off the Big Moments in the well-known life.

Here Coppola's film falls apart, because her special gift is for conveying emotional and psychological states suggestively, allusively, and impressionistically, by means of collocations of images; she has less talent for telling a straightforward tale. The movie suffers when you feel, as you often do, that she's read Fraser's biography thoroughly and is dutifully reproducing incidents of her subject's life. Do we really need the story, which Fraser tells in great detail and which Coppola obligingly includes here, of how the dying Louis XV was forced to send away his mistress, Mme. du Barry, in order that he might receive Communion on his deathbed? The episode, hastily sketched in and, I suspect, incomprehensible to anyone unfamiliar with the sorry story of the awful death of the
Bien-aimé
, adds absolutely nothing to our understanding of the film's subject, and ends by being a confusing distraction.

So too many of the episodes taken from the latter parts of Antoinette's life—which is to say, the part of her life that took place after the crisis that is of real interest to Coppola, which is the crisis of a young girl torn from her natural setting and forced to stay afloat, willy-nilly, in a strange and foreign place. Coppola's apparent lack of interest in anything outside of the cocooned and photogenic private world of the doomed queen is evident in the desultory quality of the many stilted moments designed to convey what's going on in the world beyond Versailles—the kind of clanking scene in which someone says to the king at a meeting of his council, “The Americans are asking for help with their revolution,” or, worse, when we see someone rush up to the king and announce, “The Bastille has been stormed!”

The director tries to cover over her lack of real interest in “History” with some catchy tricks (there's a little montage in which we see some portraits of the queen bearing scribbled labels that say things like “Madame Deficit,” and so forth), but it seems an afterthought; such moments are mere chronological signposts, and the film loses its appeal whenever we're forced to rush by them.
Marie Antoinette
would have succeeded better purely on formal terms if it had never attempted to include this material—if it had been what I suspect Coppola always wanted it to be, a reverie on what it might have been like to be the very young Marie Antoinette, rather than a straight account of her life. In the end, it's too little of either.

 

But then—and this is the second and fatal problem with Coppola's movie—could you, indeed
should
you really make a film about Marie Antoinette the victimized young woman as if she were the private person she apparently wished, at times, she'd been? There is, if anything, something Marie Antoinette-ish about the director's impatient disdain for the outside world, for the history that was going on all around her sensitive and troubled heroine. (And not just around her, but right in front of her: when the Estates General finally met in May 1789, it was at Versailles—the first great intrusion of the coming Revolution into that enclave—although you'd never guess as much from this movie.)

There's nothing wrong with being interested in the inner life of a queen who was, in the end quite tragically, nothing more than the “average woman” to which the subtitle of Stefan Zweig's 1932 biography alludes, an all-too-ordinary person placed by fate in extraordinary circumstances. But this particular life, the rather unexceptional personality whose contours Coppola is interested in delineating here—and which she does delineate so effectively at times—had an enormous impact on history, on real events and persons. That this was already clear to the queen's contemporaries is evident from the concerns about the young queen's behavior expressed by her brother Joseph (no slouch himself when it came to hectoring letters), which are, in hindsight, particularly significant. “In very truth I tremble for your happiness,” he wrote his sister, “seeing that in the long run things cannot go on like this…the revolution will be a cruel one, and perhaps of your own making.”

The provocative relationship between personality and history in the case of Marie Antoinette has indeed been clear to subsequent generations. Writing thirty years after the Revolution, the comtesse de La Tour du Pin, by then a fifty-year-old émigrée, who had been presented at court as a young woman and whose glamorous mother had been a lady-in-waiting to the queen (“the queen liked my mother, she was always captivated by glitter and my mother was very much the rage”), ruminated on the inevitable lessons to be gleaned from the queen's life:

But the contrast has apparently provoked no such reflection in Coppola, who in her new film gives you, as it were, the dress but not the abyss. To be so unreflective, to want to make a film about Marie Antoinette that ignores who she was in history, seems shockingly naive, intellectually; it's like wanting to make a film about what it's like to be a starving artist and deciding to have your hero be the young Adolf Hitler.

And so Coppola's movie, which works so hard and with such imagination to include in its portrait much that has been ignored, ends up leaving out much that cannot be ignored. Most egregiously, it fails completely to convey in any way why it was that this particular queen aroused the loathing of many in her country. You get absolutely no sense from the new
Marie Antoinette
of the immense and combustible loathing that was felt for the queen outside her circle of intimates as the years went by, while she was languishing in her unstructured muslin
lévites
among the soft pillows of the Petit Trianon, among the bits of dress and décor to which Coppola's swooning camera gives an almost erotic allure. The irony is that this willed ignorance of the admittedly less photogenic outside world disserves Coppola's artistic and emotional purpose, her desire to explain and, you suspect, defend the queen: had she included points of view and voices other than the queen's, she'd have only found material to underscore some of her subject's sympathetic qualities. (There is little question that while she could make gross mistakes of judgment, nearly all of the calumnies heaped on Marie Antoinette, including the notorious Affair of the Diamond Necklace, were absurd and vicious misrepresentations, when not downright inventions.)

The result of all this is a film that is ultimately, like its subject, horribly, fatally truncated. Stefan Zweig, a far more tart and critical biographer than is Antonia Fraser, wrote of the queen that “though but little inclined to reflection, she was quick of perception, her tendency being to judge all that happened in accordance with her immediate personal impressions—for she saw only the surface of things.” It would be unfair to say that Sofia Coppola sees only the surface of things—she sees a great deal more, sees what surfaces can be the reflections of, and renders what she sees with artful ingenuity—but in this film, at least, it's as if she's been so bewitched by the fabulous beauties of what she sees, the silks and satins and shoes and frosting on the bonbons everyone always seems to be eating, that she's lost track of crucial events and the inescapable larger significance of her subject's life.

Indeed, the final silent image in this movie, so filled as it is with striking and suggestive images, tells you more about Coppola, and perhaps our own historical moment, than it could possibly tell you about Marie Antoinette. It's a mournful shot of the queen's state bedchamber at Versailles, ransacked by the revolutionary mob the night before the queen and her family were forced to leave for Paris and, eventually, death (the end point to all the frivolity which, tellingly, Coppola cannot bring herself to narrate): the camera lingers over the opulent room, its glittering chandeliers askew, its exquisite boiseries cracked and mangled. You'd never guess from this that men's lives—those of the queen's guards—were also destroyed in that violence; horribly, their severed heads, stuck on pikes, were gleefully paraded before the procession bearing the royal family to Paris. But Coppola forlornly catalogs only the ruined bric-a-brac. As with the teenaged girls for whom she has such sympathy, her worst imagination of disaster, it would seem, is a messy bedroom.