Editor's Note: On this very week in 1793 the Queen Consort of France Marie Antoinette (born Maria Antonia Josepha Johanna von Habsburg-Lothringen -whew) stood "trial" and was guillotined during the French Revolution. She's haunted popular culture ever since. On this very week ten years ago in 2006, Sofia Coppola's undervalued and unconventional biopic Marie Antoinette began its trip to movie theaters. We're celebrating every day at 3 PM EST for a week. Party.
Lynn Lee looks back at Marie Antoinette's (2006) controversial use of music...
First come the fast, bracing guitar chords, followed by the almost-too-on-point Gang of Four lyrics - “The problem of leisure, what to do for pleasure?” - as the opening credits roll in bright hot pink against a black background. We catch a quick shot of a reclining Marie Antoinette (Kirsten Dunst), tasting one of an array of sumptuous cakes as she tries on a shoe and gives a saucy sideways glance into the camera as if to say “Let me eat cake.” It’s our first tip-off that this isn’t going to be your standard historical costume drama...
At the time of its release, Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette stirred some controversy with its anachronistic touches – especially its soundtrack, which flits between period-appropriate Baroque music and the punk and post-punk sounds of Bow Wow Wow, New Order, the Cure, and the Strokes, among others. Kvetching about the music folded into a larger critique that Coppola played fast and loose with historical facts, notwithstanding that the movie was filmed at Versailles and nominally based on Antonia Fraser’s sympathetic biography of the ill-fated queen. To some, Coppola trivialized historical events by framing them as yet another tale of a lost girl searching for fulfillment within an artificially confined universe.
Dunst & Schwartzman on the set of Marie Antoinette (2006)
Not me. I love this film unreservedly and consider it Coppola’s best. It may be impressionistic rather than historically accurate, yet it’s hardly trivial or shallow in its treatment of its subject. On the contrary, it makes Marie an endearing and profoundly poignant figure, not despite but because of her total insulation from the outside world. It’s witty, even laugh-out-loud funny at times, yet surprisingly tender, especially in its depiction of her relationship with Louis XVI (Jason Schwartzman). And its mix of contemporary and period music syncs beautifully with the shifts in her moods and conception of her place in this strange soap-bubble universe.
While pensive ambient music captures Marie’s sense of isolation and disconnectedness, up-tempo New Wave songs inject jolts of energy that animate her desperate quest for amusement, whether it’s a masked ball (to the tune of Siouxsie and the Banshees’ “Hong Kong Garden”), a birthday bash that lasts till sunrise (New Order’s “Ceremony”), or an extramarital fling (Adam and the Ants’ “Kings of the Wild Frontier”). Or the sequence most viewers will probably remember best: the 18th century equivalent of a girls’ shopping spree, set to Bow Wow Wow’s “I Want Candy” and filmed as a breathless montage of pastel fabrics, shoes, champagne, and sweets. What most people might not remember is that it comes at the height of Marie’s frustration with her marriage, amid constant admonitions that she’s useless unless she gives birth to a son. What’s a girl to do with unlimited credit and no job other than to bear an heir to a husband uninterested in sex?
The rock-infused bursts of reckless self-indulgence etch a striking contrast to the rigidly formal classical compositions, which mostly serve to underscore the constraints of Marie’s official position. The latter are set off to great comedic effect early on by the stately Vivaldi concerto that accompanies the elaborate ceremony of her morning routine. But they’re also given a more serious gloss in the two Rameau operas Marie attends in Paris, at very different junctures in her royal tenure, that mark her rise and fall in the public eye. When she applauds rapturously at the first opera, the rest of the audience smiles and follows her lead, even though it’s not proper protocol; much later in the movie, when she applauds at the second opera, she draws only silence and grimly disapproving stares. It’s a sobering moment, showing how far her stock has fallen, and an omen of how much farther she will fall. It’s also another reminder that Coppola knew exactly what she was doing with every musical choice for every scene. Far from being disjointed or discordant, the eclectic, century-leaping soundtrack is a seamless part of what makes the film so memorable - and so timeless.