Oh, Fortuna! Actually, the reversal of fortune has been high concept at least since Aeschylus’s Oresteia and Sophocles’s Oedipus. As Shakespeare puts it, people love to hear “sad stories on the death of kings,” a taste he exploited in boffo hits from Richard II to King Lear. In her dreamlike Marie Antoinette, Sofia Coppola seems at first to draw more on this tradition of tragedy than on the genre of the period picture. Anachronistic touches, such as ’80s rock on the soundtrack, make the story seem more surreal and universal. And in the end, it packs great topical impact.
Played by a luminous Kirsten Dunst, the title queen doesn’t seem to have much in common with current leaders, apart from her frivolous spending and total isolation from the needs and miseries of her people. Rather, with her taste for clothes, confections, and gossip, her embodiment of celebrity worship and scandal, Coppola’s Marie Antoinette might be any member of today’s consumer culture, from a teen in a shopping mall to Madonna adopting a kid in Malawi. And here, the movie could presage broader shifts in American political culture than anything seen during Watergate or later: at the end of Marie Antoinette, when the army of the dispossessed storm Versailles, the heads they howl for might well be our own.
On the Web
Peter Keough's Outside the Frame: http://www.thephoenix.com/OutsideTheFrame/
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