Virgin Regicides

So, like, it’s really crazy, right? I’m fourteen years old and, hello, my mom thinks it’s OK to tell me what to do with my life, yknow, how to dress, how to stand, blah blah, go marry the Dauphin of France. And I’m, like, the dolphin? And she’s like, don’t cheek me young lady, I’m the Empress of Austria wahwahwhatever. So I think, it’s a trip to France: good clothes, little cookies, I can take my dog. French people love cute dogs. I’ll get my hair done, maybe some new shoes, it’ll be cool.

*

Sofia Coppola’s film Marie Antoinette doesn’t quite stand in relation to Antonia Fraser’s biography The Journey of Marie Antoinette as Amy Heckerling’s Clueless does to Emma, but it’s certainly a second cousin of Heckerling’s irreverent approach. Above all, it’s a Sofia Coppola (Coppola fille?) film, so expect fragmentary scenes, relentlessly cool music, longeurs and a famous actress’ butt. Probably all in the first five minutes.

MA should be a post-feminist gimme: it’s got Kirsten Dunst as Mary-Jane the shopping queen, Marianne Faithfull as an impressive Empress and its production company takes its name from Bow Wow Wow’s grrl classic, "I Want Candy." It’s bubblegum fun, with cakes that look like dresses, dresses that look like furniture, and furniture that looks like it could feed a small army of hungry Parisian peasants.

That’s kinda the problem: it’s hard to be sympathetic to a film whose implicit (with emphasis on the im-) critique of that crazy aristocratic excess is to produce the film version of it. Despite Dunst’s knowing looks to the camera, this is no Orlando, with its spit and sellotape costumes and spare sets. The costume credits are three times as long as the cast list — not including hairstylists. There’s none of the unstudied suburban charm of Coppola’s first film, Virgin Suicides: more a sense that here’s a girl who can get the cash (from Daddy’s wallet, so might think a cynic) and splash it out on an elaborate pair of shoes that will appear in a single shot. OK, it’s a dazzling shot in a music video-cum-Versace ad way, but after eight or nine shots of shoes you’re thinking "So when does the beheading begin?"

And yet andyetandyet. Somehow she pulls it out the bag, and by the time the baying mobs have arrived, satisfying the desire for a story to be told that you already know, you do care. Or I did: these two children with way more money than sense who are no more than figureheads. Sweet, almost sexless, guileless pawns who just wanna have fun. The film is at its best when it’s most reminiscent of VS and Lost in Translation: moments of teenage longing and abandon on the one hand — there’s a fantastic scene of hide and seek played in a moonlit hall of mirrors — and despair and abandonment on the other, the loneliness of being dropped into an alien world with hideously complicated rules.

Yes, much of the film presents a France that is a sanitised theme park for Americans (like Japan in LiT), but many of the dissonances between what you think you know about Marie — and what you think you see — and the underlying story are creatively and persuasively expressed. It’s Sex in the Country (complete with Manolo-chewing goats), with a hidden edge. The glamour of shoes and sweeties quickly palls — is constructed to pall — and you’ll leave the cinema wondering if you’ll ever eat another piece of cake again. After all, it might be the last thing that you do.

If you have comments about this article please email us @ comments@shebytches.com.