So I decided, for once, to see a movie before everyone else in the world saw it and write up a review immediately so it could, you know, help people out. Plus, I've been primed to see Marie Antoinette for months now, for some reason. Perhaps it's because I was such a big fan of Lost in Traslation (the last film written and directed by M.A.'s writer-director, Sofia Coppola), but I doubt that very much, as I didn't expect them to be similar at all in feel or tone (though, strangely, they match a little, now that I think about it). I think it was because I like Kirsten Dunst, when she's in the right type of role, and the idea of Jason Schwartzman, a natural clown, as the incredibly restrained/repressed Louis XVI, well, that's worth investigating.

So let's take a moment, first, to talk about the, you know, actual Marie Antoinette. Marie Antoinette was sent to secure a lasting allience between the Austro-Hungarian Empire (ruled by her mother, Maria Theresa) and France. She was to do this, of course, by marrying, at the age of 14, the 15 year old French dauphin Louis-August. They were expected to produce an heir. You know what? It doesn't really matter--most of this is in the film and what's not I got from watching a PBS documentary about a month ago. The long and short of it is: there was nothing in the film that might not be accurate. There's some speculation (whether or not she actually had an affair with Count Fersen, for example) but nothing outright wrong, that I spotted. Then again, I am not a scholar of the French monarchy. And I think that gives the movie some weight. These are things the occurred, perhaps not how they are pictured, but they occurred. And it's interesting to see them so strictly filtered through Marie Anoinette's perspective: the focus lies in much different places than it does when watching something written by historians.

The movie itself is basically, like, 120 scenes that last between 30 and 90 seconds apiece. It's feels... chopped up because of that. Like a very long set of mood pieces. And as such, don't feel ashamed if you can't keep track of who each of the characters are. They come and go. As long as you've got a hold of Dunst and Schwartzman--both, it turns out, are INSANELY well chosen in their roles. Dunst looks the part, enough, but she does a good job playing the teenaged-queen who is in well over her head.

And being tiny mood pieces, they rely on the music to get the work done at some turns. There's been a lot of talk about how the music is modern music. Contemporary rock music, more or less, and how some don't think it squares with the period the film is set it. They're wrong. The shopping/decadant food montage set to "I Want Candy" would be brilliant all by itself. But the kind of rock that Coppola uses, generally, is well chosen--it's open and vaguely melancholic or excited in the same way both the structure of the film is and, somehow, the pictures themselves. Which are gorgeous, by the way. The colors are bright and the grounds of Versalle couldn't possibly be made to look anything other than amazing, particularly as the sun rises, which it does more than once over the course of the movie.

To return to the overlap betwixt this and Lost in Translation: there's very little. They both deal with alienation, yes, but in quite different ways. There's only one or two of the kind of stranger-in-a-strange-land moments that people complained about in Lost in Translation and those come at the very beginning (are are utterly germaine to what Marie Antoinette must've been going through). More interesting is the syntactical overlap. Coppola relies far less on conventionally structured scenes and story here--indeed, it's almost plotless, at times. Or, rather, threads of plot float in and out without any good indication of whether or not they'll be back or not. But she weaves the threads, the characters, the music in and out in a--I want to say impressionistic--sort of way. And that it's not rigorously structured might bother you, but it worked for me.

And that's probably a good way to sum up my views on the film at large: it might bother you, but it worked for me. Dunst does a spectacular job bringing to life all the very many different things that MA was (and was expected to be). Schwartzman is amazingly restrained (and seems to square almost perfectly with the real life Louis XVI). Coppola leans a little on the music, but it's very well chosen, so it's not a bother. It's a series of very small happenings, like a meal composed almost entirely of appetizers and when I walked out of the theater I thought that I may not have been satisfied, after having been fed like that, but as the day goes on, I find the images sticking with me and longing for that excellent combination of pictures and sounds to be rendered for me again. Very well done. Neither heavy nor insubstantial, like one of the well made treats she's presented with, time and again.

I may just go see it again tomorrow.

Oh, and Rip Torn as Louis XV steals every scene he's in.