Sofia Coppola’s giddy, girly and defiantly revisionist Marie Antoinette didn’t deserve the reaction it got in Cannes earlier this year. According to the reports, the credits of the film rolled to a chorus of Gallic boos. In fact, there were at least as many audience members cheering as catcalling, and besides, there is hardly a competition film shown at Cannes without some pompous misery voicing his disdain.

But a few boos for Coppola makes the headlines, whereas an assault of jeers for Lucas Belvaux, say, or Paolo Sorrentino, doesn’t have the same news cachet.

This is perhaps one of the reasons that Coppola was attracted to the story of France’s favourite cake-scoffing pariah as the subject of her third feature film. Hollywood royalty herself, Coppola clearly identifies strongly with this ill-fated Queen of France. Like her subject, Coppola has had to endure pointed whispers about her fitness and ability to fulfil her chosen career. It’s a particular kind of spotlight that they share which is specifically attuned to highlight the slip-ups and faux pas. Lost in Translation was a semi-autobiographical story and to some extent the same is true of Marie Antoinette.

Her approach to the spendthrift monarch couldn’t be more sympathetic if she just scrapped the film and had a girls-together pyjama party instead. Her Marie, ably brought to life by Kirsten Dunst, is a hedonist, a party girl, a shopaholic and a shoe obsessive. But she is also a dutiful daughter and devoted mother, and, for the most part, a respectful and supportive wife. Her profligate behaviour is the natural consequence of taking a silly child with a love for pretty things and surrounding her with puppies, gowns, champagne and fripperies.

Coppola’s Marie compensates for the disappointments of her gilded cage — a distant and rather inept husband (Coppola’s cousin, Jason Schwartzman), her inability to produce an heir, the backbiting whispers that hiss around the corridors of Versailles — by blowing France’s defence budget on shiny trinkets and good times. She’s a kid running riot in a candy store, with nobody to tell her when she’s had too much.

What makes Coppola’s film interesting, however, is not the obvious affection and recognition she has for Marie. It is her lively, unconventional approach to the traditionally rather more restrained costume drama.

Coppola is gleefully anachronistic in her soundtrack choices — dusty harpsichord pieces are roundly outnumbered by Eighties post-punk and pop. She permits her cast to work in whatever accent suits them — Dunst keeps her American drawl, but the Australian actress Rose Byrne (Marie’s partner in crime, the Duchesse de Polignac) plays it for laughs with an aristocratic British bray. The style is closer to a teen movie than a conventional historical drama; the atmosphere is a sugar-rush of giggly excitement.

This works well for the initial stages of the film, when the 14-year-old Austrian archduchess is handed the keys to the most opulent dressing-up box in European history. However, the film loses credibility later. Coppola makes no attempt to age her actors, despite the fact that Marie was in her thirties by the time her tenure at Versailles ended. The queen reads a passage from Rousseau to the assembled fawning socialites, a scene presumably intended to imbue Marie with some intellectual weight.

The result however is forced and faintly ridiculous. The doomed queen is as fluffy as a meringue, and, watchable as it is, so is the film.

Most disappointing is the dialogue, banal twittering which is largely drowned out by the wall-to-wall soundtrack — come to think of it, that’s probably the reason for the wall-to-wall soundtrack. The Court of Versailles was almost certainly a very trivial and tedious place, but I’m sure the level of character assassination was better, and funnier, than the flaccid “What does she think she’s wearing?” jibes that wall-paper Marie Antoinette.

WENDY IDE

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