By Caroline Weber, an associate professor of French at Barnard College, is the author of “Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution.” (THE NEW YORK TIMES, 21/10/06):
WHY, the French journalist wanted to know, “do you Americans insist on taking what is France’s and making it yours?”
Like the Cannes audiences who blasted Kirsten Dunst as the vapid, pampered party queen in Sofia Coppola’s “Marie Antoinette,” my interviewer seemed indignant that an American-born author of a book on the same historical figure would dare lay claim to this quintessentially French icon.
What these Gallic complaints overlook is that, throughout history, one thing has always remained true of Marie Antoinette: With her glittering rise and shattering fall, her ambiguous political allegiances and unmistakable personal style, the queen has proven multifaceted enough to accommodate most any interpretation, any ideology, any cultural bias. Reinvention and Marie Antoinette go together like cake and frosting.
In the final years of the reign of her husband, Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette was a lightning rod for the simmering political discontents that, in 1789, erupted in the cataclysm of the French Revolution. Her clothes, in particular, were construed as symbols of a regime in dire need of a makeover.
After she brought masculine hairstyles and riding coats into vogue, critics reviled her as “emasculating” Louis XVI, whose woefully ineffectual handling of his kingdom’s problems only lent credence to the insult. The future revolutionary leader Honoré-Gabriel de Mirabeau sarcastically deemed Marie Antoinette “the only man left” in the king’s government, and after that government fell, she remained its most despised emblem.
When the revolutionary state went to war against Hapsburg Austria (the queen’s homeland), political pamphleteers identified the Hapsburg-imported muslin chemise dresses she wore as proof of her involvement in a counter-revolutionary conspiracy. By depicting her as the avatar of Bourbon inadequacy and of Austrian menace, her contemporaries projected onto Marie Antoinette the grievances and fears that fueled the Revolution as a whole.
Executed in 1793, Marie Antoinette did not vanish from the public consciousness. Au contraire: 19th-century France continued to reinvent her in its own, ever-changing image.
When, for instance, her surviving Bourbon brothers-in-law returned to power with the Restoration of 1815, the fallen queen was repackaged as a tragic royalist martyr.
Popular images proliferated in which a saint-like Marie Antoinette either languished in prison in a black mourning gown (an homage to her husband, guillotined 10 months before her) or journeyed to the scaffold in a white chemise (no longer a sign of Hapsburg loyalty but of monarchist ardor, because white evoked the Bourbon fleur-de-lis).
Prints like these supported the era’s prevailing view of the Revolution as the disastrous unseating of gods by monsters. Exemplifying the royals’ beleaguered but undiminished glory, Marie Antoinette lent pathos to their travails, and legitimacy to their Restoration.
Although her fortunes dwindled after the liberal “citizen king” Louis Philippe ousted his Bourbon cousins in 1830, Marie Antoinette returned to prominence two decades later with the rise of the Second Empire. Eugénie, the wife of Emperor Napoleon III, harbored a particular fondness for Marie Antoinette, on whose iconic glamour she explicitly modeled her own public image.
In 1867, the empress organized the first-ever Marie Antoinette retrospective, held at the queen’s famed country retreat, the Petit Trianon. The era’s scribbling classes promptly realized that to praise the dead consort was to celebrate the living one, and duly spilled copious amounts of ink in lauding Marie Antoinette’s hyper-decorated, rococo femininity — so fundamental to the Eugénie persona — as a prime cultural virtue. Once again, the queen’s posthumous rehabilitation both reflected and shaped the zeitgeist.
This new movie, with its pop anthems and Valley Girl queen, is simply the latest manifestation of that same tradition — a new Marie Antoinette, to reflect Ms. Coppola’s time and place. The filmmaker indicated as much when she said that in making “Marie Antoinette,” she felt no compunction to be “a fetishist” about historical accuracy. “I’m just, like, making it my thing,” she declared.
Ms. Coppola has constructed pre-revolutionary Versailles at its giddiest and most gorgeous, a magical kingdom, all rivers of Champagne and mountains of macaroons. There is pleasure to spare: Massage? Sure! Cocaine? Why not? Manolo Blahniks? The more, the better! Starving peasants? Who?
France’s unwashed masses — the very people who will one day demand (and secure) the queen’s death — are strictly banned from the fabulous party. Ms. Coppola keeps their grand-scale suffering off camera, outside the frame.
When, in one scene, the Austrian ambassador tries to deliver an urgent political brief, the pretty, pink-cheeked queen not only ignores him but embarks on a giddy shopping spree, set to Bow Wow Wow’s 1980’s hit, “I Want Candy.” “Got everything that I desire,” crows the group’s kittenish, adolescent singer, as the happy-go-lucky royal nibbles on a pastry and reaches for a fur-lined stiletto.
We know the fate toward which Marie Antoinette’s reckless consumerism and inordinate privilege will lead her. Ms. Coppola, however, opts to end the movie a few years short of the bloody upheaval that toppled the consort’s throne (and head).
Strangely enough, it’s this very avoidance, this shallowness — rightly criticized by the movie’s detractors — that imbues Ms. Coppola’s cinematic eye candy with a distinctly contemporary political bite.
In cloaking 21st-century American arrogance and ignorance in the pastel-colored finery of the 18th-century French court, Ms. Coppola inadvertently exposes the tarnish on our own gilded age.
With no interest in thorny policy issues, no care for the consequences of her actions, and no doubts about her own entitlement, this Marie Antoinette is today’s ugly American par excellence: a Bush Yankee in King Louis’s court.
And like the movie’s royal shopaholic, whose girls-just-want-to-have-fun outlook cannot process any unpleasantness outside the palace walls, we Americans single-mindedly pursue our pleasures, even as a wider and scarier world clamors for our attention.
But why worry? Ms. Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, ensconced in her unapologetically decadent bubble, acts as though she rules the world even as she ruins it. Why shouldn’t we, following her all-too American lead, expect to have our cake and eat it, too?