Marie Arseface

Back into my notebook again, driven to it by repetitive boredom injury. I seem to keep accidentally drawing the short straw regarding film selection.

This time 'Marie Antoinette'. I have seen this film so many times I’ve forgotten the sheer horror of seeing it first time through, not knowing how relatively close it is to finishing at each given extended period of boringness. At least now I know that at this particular boring, pointless, inappropriately-soundtrack scene, there’s only twenty minutes to go. And so on.

I can’t figure out what point Sofia Coppola is trying to make. Her clueless spoiled heroine is neither likable nor hateable. There’s just an overwhelming ambivalence. I guess it’s because there are so few dramatic scenes for us to judge her character. Anything of any interest seems to happen off screen, at a different time.

Each scene is accompanied by either contemporaneous music, like harpsichord, organs or chamber arrangements; or some totally incongruous, jarring juxtaposition: Gang of Four, Siouxie and the Banshees, New Order, Aphex Twin, and of all people, The Strokes. What exactly is her point with this? All these endless picturesque Baroque templates with the most random geek mixtape in the aural foreground.

The whole film comes across like some feature-length period episode of MTV Cribs. “Here’s me with me bitches in fancy shoes! And here’s me a few days before I get executed!”

The plot lacks any sense of consequence. For example, Antoinette is under great political pressure to provide an heir to the thrown and her husband seems totally uninterested. So she spends at least a quarter of the film trying to get him to fuck her so that everyone will leave her alone. We are given no insight into why he’s not interested. I mean, I’m no Kirsten Dunst fan either, but if she was my arranged wife and she was tarted up like a Queen the whole time, I think I’d be able to get around to it.

So eventually he fucks her. Oh, and then soon after (in the film that is, not in the narrative time sequence which is so distorted and confusing) she has an affair with a beefy Swedish soldier for a bit. And then he leaves. A bit of boo hoo on her part. Lots of hugging pillows and staring out of windows. Classic S. Coppola – the intense cinematic affair with her main part (see Lost in Translation). Trying to make her heroine as pretty and sad looking as possible.

At the one point when there might actually be some action – i.e. we might actually get to watch her sappy head get removed by an angry mob, and be given an ENDING to the story, Coppola bottles it. It’s barely even suggested.

For a two hour film where seemingly nothing happens, it seems ridiculous that the closing ten minutes have the following plot elements introduced and dispensed with simultaneously:

Her mother dies. Boo hoo? Barely.

“Let them eat cake,” phrase is reportedly said. She quickly dismisses it as untrue amongst friends.

She randomly gives birth to an heir. Er, ok. Didn’t see that coming.

Suddenly everyone in the court and the country (because of lots of interesting things happening outside of what we’re being shown) suddenly turns against her.

Her newly born son dies. We know this through a cheap cinematic technique. Coppola shows a portrait of Antoinette being placed on the wall. She is surrounded by her children. Then we see it removed and when it’s put back, one of them has been erased. Right.

The Bastille is stormed (offscreen) and an angry mob attack her palace (very cheap, we don’t see anything).

She eventually escapes, safely and we watch her gaze as the sun sets on the palace gardens.

THE END.

Howay! What utter nonsense!

What is most offensive about the film is the inconsistency of the accents. The film is about a turbulent time in French history, and the leading character is some waifish blonde American. Surrounding her in the palace are the French aristocracy – who speak in a variety of posh English, American and a hideous parady of a French accent. There are some truly toe-curling moments when the ones with the posh English voices drop in the occasional “BON JOR MON SIEUR. MERKI BOWCOOP.”

Each syllable crudely rounded like a bare-faced insult. A bird aiming poo in your ears.

It’s not over. I have to see this more times. Thankfully I can read while I’m there. Finished Kurt Vonnegut’s ‘Breakfast of Champions’, which was one of the strangest novels I’ve read in a long time. A lot of fun though. And some beautiful hand drawings. Just started Henry Miller’s ‘Tropic of Cancer.’

Other than that, each day continues to be some kind of uphill walk. As Will Oldham has me singing in the streets, ‘It’s a Hard Life For a Man with No Wife.’