The marriage is to unify her country and Louis's. And the gist of the story finds Marie under tremendous pressure from her family to seduce her boyishly asexual husband for an heir that will seal the Franco-Austrian alliance. For her part, Marie looks both enthralled with and skittish about her new assignment. She gains a husband, but she loses a dog. ``Mops!" Marie cries as someone takes away her tiny pocket pug.
What, you ask, is Coppola up to? ``The Simple Life Versailles " ? It's a tempting possibility, since the first quarter of ``Marie Antoinette" presents, in unsparing detail, the minutia of royal etiquette and Marie's annoyance with it.
One morning dressing ritual leaves her shivering naked as the woman of the highest rank wins the honor of slipping a gown over her. ``This is ridiculous," Marie snarls. The film makes delicate comedy of the spectacle that her marriage is required to be. Dozens stand by as she and Louis climb into bed for the first time. Scores look on as they sit before copious piles of food. Before there was reality television, there was this: reality tableaux vivant. But only up to a point is Dunst's Marie like a certain American heiress with fake-French trappings. And only up to a point is the filmmaker offering satirical commentary.
Does Coppola mean to tell us that were Marie Antoinette with us today that she'd listen to the Strokes and issue decrees via MySpace? Is it that she was just grossly misunderstood, as Antonia Fraser demonstrated in the terrific book that inspired this movie? Or does Coppola feel a bond with Marie as a tastemaker? As art, the movie is neither shallow nor profound, just inconsequential. Yet Coppola is too clever a filmmaker to dismiss the movie out of hand. If her film is mostly surface then she skims with style.
