Review: "Marie Antoinette"

The key to understanding Marie Antoinette, in my opinion, is its anachronistically modern flavour. I quite enjoyed it. A few years ago I was writing a murder mystery set in the late 19th Century. I needed to do research on the period, and so I turned to the short stories of Arthur Conan Doyle. To my surprise, I found that there was very little description of the things I was interested in: hansom cabs, trains and subways, the nature of indoor lighting and plumbing, etc.


Then it hit me. Doyle, who was actually living in the 1890s, would have no need to describe what things were like in the 1890s to his audience (who, as far as he was concerned, were also living in the 1890s).  Doyle would no more spend time describing a hansom cab than I would a Honda Civic.  Such details (called "period signifiers") are actually an obvious sign that a work was written many years after it was set.

In contrast, Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette contains numerous modern day anachronisms for a film set in the late 18th Centruy.  It is distracting to see modern music, shoes, and food, until we realize that the music people listened to "back then" would have been their "modern" music.  By playing modern music, the past becomes less foreign to us.  Because, after all, it would not have been foreign to Marie Antoinette.

The film quickly establishes the tightly circumscribed world of Marie Antoinette and her husband Louis XVI.  They are compelled to marry each other without the slightest thought for their wishes. Their sex life is intensely scrutinized.  Every aspect of their life at Versailles is highly regulated, from the heirarchy of Marie's various attendants  to the meals and social engagements.

Marie and Louis do not making the world around them worse in any material fashion.  Instead, their greatest sin is that they utterly lack the force of character necessary to change it. What does Marie Antoinette do instead?  She improves the palace.  She gives money to charity.  She builds a little model farm, and grows her own food (or has it grown), which she gives to charity. She attends the opera, and yes, she throws parties, one after another, drinking champagne and laughing and dancing and listening to music.  She has an affair, something which is abundantly reasonable given her marital life.

Outside Versailles, the people of France are suffering, but Marie never sees them.  Her world is hermetically sealed.  Servants are like furniture.  In as much as she thinks about her subjects at all, it is with concern, but distant concern, ameliorated by charitable donations.

A lot has been written about how Sofia Coppola sympathized with Marie Antoinette, since Coppola was the daughter of Hollywood royalty and grew up in very privileged surroundings.  But what gives this movie its enormous emotional power goes much deeper than that.

The film tempts us to indulge in exactly the same kind of bourgeois moralizing as the sans culottes when they cut off Marie Antoinette's head.  After all, she lives in a palace! She parties all the time!  But what struck me about this film was not the differences between Marie Antoinette's life and my own, but the similarities.  The lack of real ability to change the world around me. The force of my social class and family.  The ineffectual artistic and moral ambitions.  The socializing.  The worrying.  The narrowness of my ability to perceive the world around me.

Marie Antoinette was rich?  Shit.  Last year two billion people lived on less than two dollars a day.  I earned a hundred and fifty times as much, and a lot of the time I wasn't even doing anything.  What more did I do for the wretched of the earth than she ever did?  What difference did I make?  How many genuinely poor people did I see?

Because that's all of our lives.  We accept the world we're born into, and follow whatever rules it lays down for us. We live in a walled palace of our own making, ignorant about what lies outside.  We worry about those less fortunate than us, but not too much. We have such pretty plans for the things we'll do, and we all think we're special and exceptional. And outside of the pastel walls of the world we live in, there are huge monstrous forces circling us, that could crush us at a moment's notice.

Marie Antoinette was an unremarkable queen in a dangerous era. She did not deserve to die, any more than you or I do, but she she died anyway, and so could we.  The walls we, or others, set up around us are as thin as gauze   At a moment they can be torn away.  When it happens it is not even tragic, because it is so ridiculous to think we were ever protected in the first place.  To think we are any different than Marie Antoinette is to commit the same sin she did, only with far less excuse.