Marie Antoinette (2006)

User Rating:

6.4/10   

Director:

Sofia Coppola

Writer (WGA):

Sofia Coppola (written by)

Release Date:

20 October 2006 (USA)

Genre:

Biography | Drama | History

Tagline:

Let Them Eat Cake

Plot:

The retelling of France's iconic but ill-fated queen, Marie Antoinette. From her betrothal and marriage to Louis XVI at 15 to her reign as queen at 19 and to the end of her reign as queen and ultimately the fall of Versailles.

Plot Keywords:

Marie Antoinette | Queen | France | Austria | Versailles

Awards:

Won Oscar. Another 6 wins & 9 nominations

Cast

Kirsten Dunst	...	Marie Antoinette
Jason Schwartzman	...	Louis XVI
Judy Davis	...	Comtesse de Noailles
Rip Torn	...	Louis XV
Rose Byrne	...	Duchesse de Polignac
Asia Argento	...	Comtesse du Barry
Molly Shannon	...	Aunt Victoire
Shirley Henderson	...	Aunt Sophie
Danny Huston	...	Emperor Joseph
Marianne Faithfull	...	Maria Teresa
Mary Nighy	...	Princesse Lamballe
Sebastian Armesto	...	Comte de Provence
Jamie Dornan	...	Count Fersen
Aurore Clément	...	Duchesse de Char
Guillaume Gallienne	...	Vergennes

Also Known As:

Marie Antoinette (France)

MPAA:

Rated PG-13 for sexual content, partial nudity and innuendo.

Runtime:

123 min

Country:

USA | France | Japan

Language:

French | English

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

1.85 : 1

Sound Mix:

DTS | SDDS | Dolby Digital

Certification:

Netherlands:AL | Switzerland:10 (canton of Geneva) | Switzerland:10 (canton of Vaud) | USA:PG-13 | Ireland:12A | Finland:S | UK:12A | France:U | Canada:G (Québec) | Canada:PG (British Columbia/Ontario) | Germany:o.Al. | Italy:T | Philippines:R-13 | Sweden:Btl | Hong Kong:IIA | Portugal:M/12 | Argentina:Atp | Brazil:14 | Singapore:PG | Australia:PG | South Korea:15 | Taiwan:PG-12 | Peru:PT

Filming Locations:

Basildon Park, Lower Basildon, Berkshire, England, UK

Company:

Columbia Pictures Corporation

Trivia:

Was ranked #3 on US Weekly's "Top Ten Films of 2006".

Goofs:

Anachronisms: In the scene where Mercy lectures Marie on offering meats to Louis's hunting party, she offers him some Ladurée macaroons. Ladurée opened for business in 1862, 73 years after Marie left Versailles.

Quotes:

Marie-Antoinette: Am I to be Austrian or the Dauphine of France?
Ambassador Mercy: You must be both.

Movie Connections:

Referenced in The Making of 'Marie Antoinette' (2007) (V)

Soundtrack:

What Ever Happened

Gidget Goes to Versailles

and when she gets there, she gets bored, gossips, reads Rousseau, and has beach-blanket pot parties in Amadeus outfits. I did like the music, there is one inspired masked ball and a good "watch the sun rise" scene - the strength of this film is its connection to high school culture, seen through the eyes of a sweet, utterly conventional and finally boring teenage girl, projected from the California suburbs onto 18th century France. This is obviously also the film's weakness: this movie is a beautiful, expensive still life that knows nothing at all about French history, Europe, the Revolution, the Bourbons, how the ancien regime worked, how incompetent wars and not Marie Antoinette's Imelda-Marcos-like shoe fetish ran up the debt, about the conflict in North America with England and Spain, about how leading members of French government actually had brains - the films displays a nitwit, decadent, wig-loving, golden-furniture France as though seen by a France-hater in the Bush administration. As my brother pointed out, the movie also blew the subject of a potentially great movie, which is Marie Antoinette's inspired, sometimes brilliant defense of herself at her later trial. Trying to learn about what happened to the French court from this film is like trying to learn about American corporate culture by watching J.R Ewing's 30 second business deals at the Cattlemen's Club on Dallas. Well sure, politics wasn't the subject of the movie, but why is the "chick stuff" buried in diamonds and champagne? That makes these women seem way less tough and intelligent than they actually were in the bloody contact sport of French court politics. As an American watching this in Paris I was struck by the film's lack of historical, political, and cultural sophistication, in which Dunst is in every single frame and it's all one gigantic royal slumber party until the peasants show up in an illiterate wordless mass baying for bread and blood and shaking their satanic harvesting tools. Ouch: The film makes the most sense as a weird allegory of Hollywood inbreeding.