Marie Antoinette

Marie Antoinette is sheer eye-candy. Rich, gorgeous colors flood everything – from the costumes to the food to the gardens – everything just looks deliciously perfect. Kind of like a 1780s version of Sex & the City – but without the snappy repartee. Kristen Dunst is lovely as the jet-setting socialite (oh sorry! eighteenth century monarch). She’s an empty yet fashionable vessel floating within the bubble of her gilded castle existence. She’s not an evil person – she just doesn’t know any other way. :-(

Jason Schwartzman generally makes my skin crawl but his well-worn apathetic slacker delivery style works for Louis XVI. The DVD has an extra feature called “Louis XVI Cribs” which features Schwartzman trying to “go ghetto” while showing off Versailles. It was so embarrassingly awful that I couldn’t get through more than 3 minutes. I can’t believe his agent would allow such a thing to see the light of day.

IMHO, what really makes the film is the soundtrack. All the best of the “new romantics” are here: New Order, The Cure, Siouxsie & the Banshees, even Adam Ant. He was probably bummed not to get a small role – after all, he did look pretty good in those revolutionary-era costumes. Maybe they don’t fit quiet so well anymore…

Final note: Something about this film is strongly reminiscent of Alex Cox’s Sid and Nancy: Love Kills. Hmmm…maybe it’s the graphics? Is Sophia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette the Sid Vicious of the new era? Nope. They both come off looking like Nancy Spungen to me.