You make a movie about Marie Antoinette–one that concentrates on the “fun years” at Versailles before the French Revolution put an end to all of that–and some critics are bound to call for your heads.
Sofia Coppola and Kirsten Dunst have heard the outcries. But the director and star of the new, candy-colored historical party picture “Marie Antoinette” aren’t about to feel down over claims that they’ve made a trivial fashion show out of the queen’s much-maligned reign.
“Big elements of their lives were frivolity and superficiality, so those are elements of the story; we’re doing ‘Marie Antoinette,’ after all,” Coppola said. “That was most of her job at the time; it’s not just for fun.”
Because Marie and her husband, Louis XVI, were 18 and 20 when he became king, Coppola said she “liked the idea that she was a real girl, someone who didn’t like to do schoolwork; that there were all these teenagers running around in Versailles being in charge.”
In fact, a recent PBS documentary shows Coppola’s depiction of the queen is quite in line with the facts. Simon Schama, an authority on the French Revolution, says the queen’s mother, Austrian Empress Maria Teresa, thought of her child as “my airhead daughter, the shopaholic,” and that once Marie Antoinette became queen, she “collected a group of cheeky Valley girlfriends around her.”
Dunst, who plays the queen, says the film is not frivolous.
“Even if this movie is just beautiful to you and doesn’t connect on any other level, it’s not a frivolous film to me at all,” Dunst said. “You know, this movie’s not for everybody, I don’t have a problem with people not liking it. I’m really happy that people have strong opinions about it. It’s a really unignorable film.”