Marie Antoinette. Again.

In the run-up to the release of Marie Antoinette (October 20 in the US and the UK), Sean O'Hagan talks in last Sunday's Observer not only with Sofia Coppola but also with Antonia Fraser, author of the biography of Marie Antoinette on which the film is based: "'I love it,' she trills, 'It doesn't deviate from the story, but nor does it copy the book slavishly. It's Sofia's vision of Marie Antoinette. My vision was within the covers, hers is in the images on the screen. I enjoyed it enormously and so did Harold [Pinter, her husband].' This is indeed the case. 'He liked the film. He wrote me a sweet letter,' says Coppola, smiling.... 'It's like, if it turns out that nobody else likes it, I can still say, "Well, at least Harold Pinter did".'"

Fraser has a new book out, by the way, Love and Louis XIV: The Women in the Life of the Sun King, which Megan Marshall reviews in the New York Times Book Review - just a click away from Liesl Schillinger's review of Caroline Weber's Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution and Sena Jeter Naslund's Abundance: A Novel of Marie Antoinette.

Updated through 10/15.

Via They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?, another interview with Coppola: For the Sunday Herald, Craig McLean breaks the ice by pulling out a nine-page fashion spread for The Face dating back to 1997 - and shot by Spike Jonze.

Like most critics, the Voice's J Hoberman can't help but read Marie Antoinette as part-autobiography and finds it "a graceful, charming, and sometimes witty confection - at least for its first hour."

"This is one of the most immediate, personal costume dramas ever made, and so it's not unseemly to consider how the writer-director and her heroine overlap," insists David Edelstein in New York, and though he's cautious about saying so, he clearly likes this movie.

"It may be tempting to greet Marie Antoinette with a Jacobin snarl or a self-righteous sneer, since it is after all the story of the silly teenager who embodied a corrupt, absolutist state in its terminal decadence," writes AO Scott in the NYT, "But where's the fun in such indignation? And, more seriously, where is the justice? To say that this movie is historically irresponsible or politically suspect is both to state the obvious and to miss the point."

"[T]he movie's a veritable junk drawer of mismatched ideas," grumbles Nick Pinkerton in Reverse Shot (and in direct reply to Scott's review). Still, he does seem to have an awfully good time explaining why "there isn't much here to nourish the soul, film culture, or human understanding."

"[T]his is not - as you might have believed if you trusted the reviews out of Cannes, scrawled by critics from the garretlike confines of their hotel rooms as they clutched their Mao jackets tighter to protect themselves from the threat of beauty, pleasure and decadence - a movie about shopping," fumes Salon's Stephanie Zacharek. "It's a humanist comedy-drama decked out not in sackcloth but in ribbons - instead of flattering our ideas of our own virtuousness, it asks our sympathy for this doomed queen even as we can't help envying her privilege. And that, right there, is the challenge of Marie Antoinette."

"[M]uch of the way Coppola depicts Marie Antoinette is quite in line with the facts," argues Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times.

Earlier: Cannes reviews.

Updates, 10/15: Killian Fox in the Observer on a reprint: "If the film is gossamer thin, the book, at 629 pages, is anything but. It does grip, however, from the Hapsburg princess's faltering start to her sad and gruesome end at the guillotine, injecting pace as well as substantial detail into one of European history's great tragic tales."

"The most curious aspect of Marie Antoinette is not the speed with which she became the image of all that was wrong with France, but how various her different images are," writes historian Frances Wilson in the Independent.

Online viewing tip. Jürgen Fauth and Marcy Dermansky have video of Friday's NYFF press conference with Coppola, Kirsten Dunst, Jason Schwartzman and producer Ross Katz.

Posted by dwhudson at October 14, 2006 1:58 PM