New York Dispatch. 10.

What's a princess to do? She has a chubby shy husband who can barely manage sex after years of resisting physical contact, even if he is destined to become the king of France. She's the daughter of a successful mother, an Austrian queen who practices the art of wielding power with exquisite refinement. She has no education, and she's bored. She has also become the lightning rod for the growing public contempt for the French monarchy.

Some characters make their own history. Some, as we see here, have history thrust upon them. Sooner or later, that becomes the dilemma in Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette, which screened at the New York Film Festival this weekend.

I've already gone on record noting the inanity of this film and its mission to show the fate of a teenage princess who rebels against the French court that she's married into with a peevish contrariness. Only too late does she learn that there's another rebellion going on outside. Will the public that sees this film feel any empathy for her? Not when they realize that the clothes Marie Antoinette wore may have survived the beheading.

As others (including myself) have pointed out, there is another film about Marie Antoinette out there, this one by David Grubin, which was shown on PBS just before the NYFF opened. (As they say, check your local stations for the exact broadcast times.) The doc is true to the PBS template - interviews with the usual gang of experts, zooming shots in and out of archival material, even a weepy solo violin a la Ken Burns - yet it also gives you enough context for Marie Antoinette's pre-guillotine ordeal to make sense. Rent it or buy it for a reality check before you see the dramatic feature.

You learn about Louis XVI's love for hunting and his apprehensions about physical intimacy. "Some say he cannot get it up. Some say he cannot get it in," a note from the time reads. Marie Antoinette herself has the ailment of the over-privileged: boredom. "I'm tired of being bored. I must have some distraction, and I can only find it in increased amusements." Eventually, we learn that Marie Antoinette became the target of much of the resentment that ought to have been directed at her husband, partially because of a wave of obscene drawings featuring her with other men that were distributed throughout France and beyond. When all else fails, blame the media that spreads the rumors.

Back to Sofia Coppola's film, which critics have defended, not in the name of history (they're not that stupid), but in the name of pleasure. It sort of goes like this: The frustrations of a pleasure-deprived teen (played by Kirsten Dunst) seeking pleasure in the confinement of opulent Versailles will provide pleasure for the audience that just sits back and enjoys it. Sounds like a 21st century translation of "let them eat cake." But calling the film decadent is like calling Saddam Hussein cruel.

Marie Antoinette's dilemma seems to have been just the opposite of that of Diana, Princess of Wales, who was loved by the public (far more than her mother-in-law, Elizabeth II can imagine in The Queen which opened the festival) and despised by the House of Windsor. Misunderstanding Diana's appeal to the public meant misunderstanding the public and hastening the pace of the monarchy's irrelevance. Diana, of course, is not there to defend herself, probably another asset for her reputation. For Marie Antoinette, loathed by the public who saw her and everyone else royal as an icon of indifference, the "let them eat cake" quip, which she never made, was an epithet that crystallized the public's ire. Don't feed the hand, and it will bite you, or just behead you.

By the end of Marie Antoinette, you feel that you're being pushed into a "queens are people, too" chorus of sentiment. Imelda Marcos would be happy to explain it to you. I can understand the queen envy operating here, although I'm still having trouble understanding why so much of it is emanating from the New York Film Festival. Just look at the royals on the magazine covers at newsstands with Euro-pretensions, and you'll notice the perennial appeal of the life-styles of royal and fatuous.

Also, everything gets revised sooner or later, and why not Marie Antoinette, and why not at a time when the rich have gotten richer than they've ever been, thanks to our president's policies? Not only is the lonely suffering of a blithely indifferent monarch worthy of our attention, we seem to be told, but it's worth the many millions that it takes to make such a film. How does one get away with such an idiocy - Marie Antoinette as martyr? By dressing it up in magnificent clothes. Here the film is real spectacle, yet even if the terminal shoppers who envy those gowns won't be able to buy them, they'll be able to buy the magazines that put them on page after page. Obviously, a period film, especially one like this, has little to do with the period depicted and a lot to do with ourselves. If we don't choose our heroines, we choose to approve the choice that others like Sofia Coppola have made. In other words, we get the heroines we deserve.

On another note. Sturla Gunnarsson took issue with some of the points that I made in my review of Wrath of Gods, a documentary about the making of Beowulf & Grendel. The doc by Jon Gustafsson premiered at the Reykjavik International Film Festival. I stand by what I wrote. See Beowulf. Then see the very entertaining doc if you can find it. (You can email Jon at artio@artiofiolms.com.) Make up your own minds.

Sturla's letter seemed to contradict facts that the documentary puts right before your eyes. The making of Beowulf looked like a painful experience. Who knows? People (and that includes film directors) tend to forget the specifics of pain. The doc shows a lot of it. I was reporting what I saw on the screen.

Posted by dwhudson at October 15, 2006 2:02 PM