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.For Antoinette, anything outside the palaceis essentially fantasy.Apart from a few interludes in Paris and Austria, thereare no scenes outside Versailles at all.The analogy to Hollywood also plays out in the popular gossip that sur-rounds Antoinette, and in her casual dismissal of it.Told of widespread reportsof her alleged Let them eat cake comment, she says with irritation, I wouldnever say that. (She says it with a conviction that rewards Coppola s decisionnot to have the actors attempt any kind of accent.It frees up Dunst, whois best at her most exuberant, to react without the inhibition of a stiltedcadence.) She and her ladies-in-waiting regard the popular discontent withamusement and exasperation, but not much concern. DAVID FINCHER, SOFIA COPPOLA, AND RICHARD KELLY 179As Antoinette and her clique indulge themselves in shopping sprees andmasked balls and gambling, the detritus of their consumption piles up aroundthem: plates stacked with gooey half-eaten cakes, empty hat and shoe boxes,the morning-after ruins of late-night parties.Antoinette s worrywart adviser,Ambassador Mercy, entreats her again and again to rein in her expenditures,to consider her duties to the kingdom and her reputation among its citizens.She mostly ignores him, not out of malice or even selfishness so much as acomplete incomprehension of his words.They don t relate to anything in herlimited knowledge and experience.But, crucially, Coppola and Dunst do not approach Antoinette primarilyas a symbol, of excess or anything else.They see her first of all as a girl anda woman.This is perhaps where the film attracted its loudest detractors, itsinsistence on humanizing and, to some degree, empathizing with Antoinette.Even as it documents her artistocratic prejudices and follies, it recognizes theregimentation and reductiveness of her assigned role.Antoinette is a piece ofpolitical chattel, exchanged between kingdoms to secure political ends.Earlyin the movie, she is transported to the French-Austrian border, stripped of herclothes and examined for virginal purity, and then reclothed in new, Frenchgarb and taken by carriage to her designated husband.For all the fineries andfripperies of her life at Versailles, she remains as much property as person.Shehas no privacy; she is dressed in the morning by a coterie of attendants, andher marriage bed is inspected eagerly for signs of sexual activity.Her principalfunction, as Mercy repeatedly reminds her, is biological: she is to produce anheir.The failure of Louis to successfully consummate the marriage for severalyears places increasing pressure on Antoinette.She tries, again and again,to seduce her unwilling or unable husband, but the blame for the difficultyreverts to her.The fault is presumed to be always on the side of the woman.Ambassador Mercy hints darkly that if she cannot produce, she may wellbe thrown aside.Antoinette s life is cast in stark terms: she is a vessel.Thewomb has primacy over the woman.It is hard to imagine a male directorconveying the creeping dread of that realization as effectively as Coppoladoes.(And when Antoinette finally takes a lover the handsome horsemanCount Fersen her discovery of sexual pleasure is portrayed with pure delightrather than lasciviousness.)All of this is conveyed with Coppola s now familiar, cool detachment.Sheshoots some scenes from a static distance, isolating characters in luminescentlandscapes.Even when she uses handheld cameras to come in close to An-toinette and her entourage, it feels more intrusive than intimate.The camera s 180 POST-POP CINEMAstudied neutrality creates an interesting tension with Dunst s appealing open-ness, and with the giddy luxury of the palace.Some of Coppola s smartestmoves are on the soundtrack, which mixes light classical airs and minuetswith an iPod playlist of postpunk bomp and electronic ambience (includingsongs by Siouxsie and the Banshees, Aphex Twin, Bow Wow Wow, and herold friends Air).The music can be coy (like I Want Candy in a scene rifewith pastries, and a sexy song by the Strokes for a scene that teasingly suggestsmasturbation), but for the most part it avoids self-consciousness; the film isnever in danger of turning into Rock Me Amadeus. The performances are fine, if somewhat constrained by Coppola s obser-vational remove.Dunst is in many ways the key to the story, and she hitsa balance of girlish playfulness and, as Antoinette ages, savvy and sadness ather situation.She doesn t work overhard to make Antoinette lovable, but shemakes her many lapses seem more foolish than venal.Coppola s cousin JasonSchwartzman makes Louis an almost comical eccentric, while also suggestingan easy sense of entitlement.(His obsession with keys and locks althoughbased on historical accounts seems like one of the film s few clumsy tropes,a too-obvious metaphor for his sexual difficulties.) Because of Coppola s mix-and-match approach, the actors are free of many of the burdens of conven-tional period films.Most notably, they are not forced into awkward or floridconversational styles.The dialogue is deliberately modern and casual.Looming somewhere behind and over all of this is a sense of impendingcatastrophe.When it comes, Coppola maintains her close focus, watchingAntoinette and Louis at supper while an angry crowd thunders outside.Antoinette eventually emerges onto a balcony to face the mob seen only ina few silhouetted fists and pitchforks and silences it by bowing her head low.It is a gesture of imperious surrender, grandeur in defeat, suggesting both hertoo-late understanding of her situation, and her difficulty in accepting it.Italso, of course, foreshadows the guillotine.The film ends with the royal familyfleeing.The final shot is a silent view of their bedchamber, after the mob hasrampaged through and trashed the place.The choice to end there, rather thanwith the iconic beheadings, which came four years later, is telling.Coppola sinterest is not in Antoinette, but Antoinette at Versailles.The film begins withher arrival there and ends with her departure, the palace in shambles.Coppola has protested that she wasn t making a political film, and sheis right, in the sense that it is not an ideological movie.But the film iscertainly politically aware, as the Gang of Four song signals from the start.The song is about Western consumer capitalism, and so in its own way is themovie.Coppola may or may not have intended Versailles as an analogy to DAVID FINCHER, SOFIA COPPOLA, AND RICHARD KELLY 181modern Western affluence, but that is how it reads.The destruction glimpsedin the final shot can t help recalling the destruction of September 11
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