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It did a really good job of capturing what it must be like to be an American hipster girl imagining what it must be like to be set up with a frigid cutie and then the next thing you know you’re the queen of France. Going in I was suspicious of the sensitive indie and alterna-80s soundtrack, but I ended up really liking it, especially when it’s used for anachronistic diegetic effect, like when Dunst goes to some masquerade party that feels like a really awesome junior high dance[1] and flirts with an unmasked soldier boy. I also liked how trite all her interpersonal conflicts are, from the parental pressure to bone her new beau and make babies to the arbitrary cat-fight tension between her and Asia Argento. It also does a good job of capturing how American hipster girls like to imagine what it must be like to be a really popular mainstream celebrity princess like Lindsay Lohan, Maggie Gyllenhaal, or Chloe Sevigny,[2] like the scene in which Antoinette’s anecdotal quip-edict to “Let them eat cake” is played out as just tabloid fodder manufactured by the local celebrity gossip rag.[3] Anyway the movie has the soft muted humor of Lost in Translation and is pretty to look at but a little too long, and I don’t think Coppola’s sense of politics as it relates to the movies she makes is very well thought out, which is ok in itself, but a little problematic when making a biopic about the monarchy that was deposed by the French Revolution. What would be amazing is if all the Pretty in Pinkish girlie shoe montages were perforated here and there with little things that imply a saturated sociopolitical context. As it is, we’re as totally clueless as Dunst and man-child Schwartzman as to why all these really angry people are outside the palace of Versailles with pitchforks and torches, shouting mean things.[4] I do like how both Schwartzman’s decision to not flee before the mob arrives and Dunst’s decision to stand by her man are made in response to some vague teenage sense of duty as opposed to stoic royal dignity, but I wish we as an audience had more of a sense of what was in store for them and why, from the movie (not from whatever jumbled fragments we can remember from our high school textbooks).[5] I hear they hissed and booed when it debuted at Cannes, but I don’t know what the French cineasts are so upset about. Rip Torn’s work here is about on par with his work in Freddie Got Fingered, minus the scene of him slapping his naked man ass and demanding hysterically that onscreen son Tom Green pound him from behind.
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[1] For those looking for a qualitative statement: anything that evokes junior high in a Hollywood rom-com (or a rom-com-dram, as the case may be) is always a good thing.
[2] Some may argue about the use of “mainstream” in reference to indie darlings Maggie Gyllenhaal and Chloë Sevigny, but as soon as my lapsed subscription to EW starts calling you “indie darling” you might as well be Tom Hanks.
[3] This just makes explicit the implicit assumption that every period piece about royalty is really a self-referential Hollywood tale about contemporary celebrity. I’m also almost convinced that all Hollywood rom-coms starring an up-and-coming or already established It Girl are really about how exciting it is to be a young actress making a rom-com in Hollywood.
[4]
Something about like sending French troops overseas to assist the American Revolution instead of keeping them here in the form of bread for the people.
[5] I have more than once confused the Magna Carta and the Santa Maria in mixed company, the most publicly embarrassing instance of which occurred at Second Story Books in Bethesda, when a customer asked if we had any books on the Magna Carta and I went and checked and reported back that in fact No, we didn’t have anything on the Magna Carta in the Nautical section, and that I didn’t see any books on Columbus either.
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