Pretty Vaca

The radical frivolit

of Sofia Coppola s
Marie Antoinette
BY NATHAN LEE

Nobody throws girls on pillows like Sofia Coppola.

Whatever else her movies are ahout, they're highly engaged with listlessness.
Her Hveliest motif is torpor—catnap, boredom, daydream, reverie—and her
movies are most eloquent when they best approximate the feeling of cuddling
up in a cashmere sweater. Nothing in The Virgin Suicides is so resonant as
the tableau of the Lisbon girls sprawled in a languorous tangle of limbs. Who
can forget the panty-clad appetizer to Lost in Translation^ that luscious
morsel of pastel booty laid out on a bed like a peach in Chardin? (But can
24 I FILM COMMENT I September-October 2006
you remember the only concrete bit of knowledge expressed in the
entire film by Scarlett Johansson's character, that recent graduate
from the philosophy department at Yale?)"" "Get out of the god-
damn hotel, you pampered dimwit!" runs a complaint that misses
that the film's sensibility is most articulate when Charlotte cocoons.
Sensibility is everything in Coppola. To accuse her of lacking ideas
presumes she has any interest in them. A nonverbal, even antiver-
bal mood piece. Lost in Translation is a vague film about vague
ennui afflicting two vague people who find comfort, vaguely, by
striking up a vague friendship. Yet it is extremely precise with
ephemera: the tonality of jet lag, the pathos of an orange camou-
flage T-shirt worn inside out, what it feels like to be tipsy in the
apartment of a groovy Japanese stylist. Everyone loves it because
everything in it is upscale fantasy of the most flattering sort, but it's
really only interesting if you pretend the whole thing is a figment of
Charlotte's imagination, a melancholy fantasia she dreams up with-
out ever leaving her suite.
Marie Antoinette nearly interprets the infamous French queen
(Kirsten Dunst) as a narcoleptic. She wakes up late, cozies in car-
riages, rolls in meadows, passes out on the couch, tumbles into cush-
ions, and droops on the damask whenever possible. Maybe it's ali the
shopping and partying, her two chief pleasures, on which the movie
lavishes a great deal of attention and almost all of its intelligence. Tm
not being condescending. Coppola has a legitimate genius for parties
(the basement social in The Virgin Suicides, the all-nighter in Lost in
Translation, every other scene in Marie Antoinette). As a subject for
the cinema, fashion is no more intrinsically vapid than weaponry.
So, yeah, Marie Antoinette is not the place to go for a critique
of privilege. It wouldn't know "the masses" if they rose up and
smashed the furniture. Every time the real world threatens to rain
on Versailles, the movie stops dead in its tracks. Coppola's con-
ception has nothing to do with thinking through the politics, his-
tory, morality, or psychology of this milieu, and everything to do
with the opportunity it presents to dress up her pet tones, themes,
and gestures on a grand scale. Taken on her terms {of which I sus-
pect she's only half-conscious), the only serious mistake is an
extension of the narrative beyond her frame of reference. The
third act is a complete ruin: its lump of dramatic incidents—pub-
lic disapproval of the queen, the death of her son, the storming of
Versailles—are formless, lack conviction, and are nearly incoher-
ent on a narrative level. Marie Antoinette would be a hardcore
masterpiece if it ended with a stunning jolt of violence, hke Fat
Girl or Jeanne Dielman. There are many things the movie doesn't
do. This essay meditates on certain things it does.
* Answer: that Evelyn Waugh is a man.
^ M ^ HF RECUMBENT JEUNE FU.l.E WAS A SPECIALTY
I I 1 "f Balthus, the great French painter of adoles-
H cent girls posed in enigmatic reverie. Hieratic
H and inwardly rapt, baring their crotches and
H attended by cats, these beguiling creatures are
_JBL_ the medium of a "privileged, undisclosed, but
articulate philosophy," claims Guy Davenport in his Balthus
Notebook. They are kin to "Rilke's 'bees of the invisible,' tak-
ing in from books, from daydreaming, from as yet ambiguous
longing, from staring out windows at trees, sustenances that will
be available as Proustian ripenesses, necessities of the heart."
This is a poetics of the vague, as opposed to vague poetry, and
it nicely applies to the dreamy layabouts in Coppola's movies.
Coppola has no philosophy, but she does have books, ln the
course of her oeuvre tbey recede as a source of sustenance for her
girls, replaced by music and fashion. The most prominent texts in
Lost in Translation are faxes and the prompt of a karaoke machine.
Marie Antoinette is never less convincing than when reciting
Rousseau to her girlfriends. But the early work is big on books. Lick
the Star., her 1998 short-film debut, follows a clique of high school
girls as they cultivate vendettas based on V.C. Andrews's Flowers in
the Attic. The youngest sister in The Virgin Suicides keeps a diary. On
her death, it is retrieved from her room and studied by the pack of
neighborhood boys whose memory of tbe Lisbon girls frames the nar-
rative. "And so we started to leam about their lives, coming to hold
collective memories of times we hadn't experienced. We felt the
imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind aaive and
dreamy and how you ended up kn{iwing what colors went together
. . . We knew that they knew everything about us and that we couldn't
fathom tbem at all." There in three sentences is Marie Antoinette.
Another book: The Virgin Suicides is a reworking of Les
F.nfants terrihles., Jean Cocteau's short novel about an orphaned
brother and sister who retreat into a private world of imagination
("the Room") and are destroyed by the impulses run rampant
therein. Every Coppola picture inhabits a variation on this Room,
the moody mental myspace of her guileless heroines. They all could
be titled The Dreamlife of Angels. Her way to make movies about
these private, undisclosed realms has been to posit a fascinated
observer: the Virgin boys. Bill Murray, the court at Versailles.
Strangely, Coppola herself approaches as an outsider, evidently baf-
fled by her creations and incapable of penetrating their inner lives.
This is a very American blockage, probably magnified in Coppola's
case by her generational vantage point and celebrity upbringing.
Compare her cinema with the trenchant Room movies of Jane
September-October2006 I F I I M COMMENT I 25
Campion [Sweetie], Claire Denis [Nenette and Boni)., or Lucrecia
Martel (The Holy Girl). With each film Coppola's Rooms get bet-
ter furnished yet more empty. So too their inhabitants: Charlotte is
vacant, but Marie is pure cipher. Thomas Jefferson, in describing a
decadent French aristocracy, might as well have been blogging on
solipsistic hipsters: "The roughness of the human mind is so thor-
oughly rubbed off with them, that it seems as if one might glide
through a whole life among them without a jostle."
Of course what pisses people off about Marie Antoinette is
that tbe dreamlife nf this particular angel was the nightmare of
an entire nation.
I
HAVE TRIED NOT TO ALLOW THE SOMBER TOMB TO MAKE
its presence felt too early," writes the historian Antonia
Fraser in her introduction to Marie Antoinette: The Jour-
ney, the biography from which Coppola has adopted all
of the facts and mucb of the sympathy of her film. "The
elegiac should have its place as well as the tragic, flowers
and music as well as revolution and counter-revolution. Above all,
1 have attempted, at least so far as is humanly possible, to tell
Marie Antoinette's dramatic story without anticipating its terrible
ending." Coppola is even more solicitous of her audience, sparing
us the sight of so much as a scratch on the queen's famously long
and elegant neck.
Maria Antonia Josepha Joanna was by all accounts a remark-
ably pretty and graceful young woman. Madame Vigee Le Brun,
an artist who would later paint her portrait, spoke of "skin so
transparent that it allowed no shadow." More than one writer
compared her to the Venus of the Aeneid, who "by her gait . . .
revealed that she was in truth a goddess." She was the fifteenth
child born to Maria Theresa, Queen of Hungary and Empress of
the Holy Roman Empire, a woman as fearsome as she was fertile.
As such, the lovely Archduchess was lost in the shuffle of her
mother's dynastic maneuvers, that grand game of placing (s)pawns
in advantageous positions throughout the courts of Europe. Marie
Antoinette was educated in dance but little else. No one ever com-
pared her to Athena. At I ^, she was more or less illiterate. She was
ignorant of history, indifferent to politics, never much of a reader.
Like Charlotte in Lost in Translation or the kids in a Bujalski film,
she spoke "like a grasshopper." These things are worth remem-
bering when confronted by a movie totally in thrall to a dunce.
Successful marriages and tragic deaths eventually drained
Maria Theresa's arsenal, so wben the time came to fire an Aus-
trian princess into the Bourbon court, she loaded her blank into
the chamber. Coppola starts here. Marie Antoinette is greeted at
the border by her chief handler, the Comtesse de Noailles,
described by the Goncourt brothers as "the bad fairy" of Ver-
sailles, and played by Judy Davis as a brittle tight-ass dressed in
shades of Grey Poupon. We meet King Louis XV (an earthy Rip
Torn), the Dauphin (a sweet and subdued Jason Scbwartzman),
and two bitchy aunts (Molly Shannon and Shirley Henderson).
Stripped of all things Austrian—shots of Kirsten Dunst's butt are
heading to a celebrity-skin website any minute now—the Arcb-
ducbess of Vienna is transformed into the Dauphine of France and
voyages onward to the wonderful horrible life of Versailles.
"Jynweythek Ylow," a fizzing percussive jangle by Aphex Twin,
accompanies her into the gilded cage. Attired in pale blue silk,
Marie Antoinette takes baby steps into a flabbergasting arabesque:
26 I FILM COMMENT I September-October2006
Her use of pop music (Gang of
Four over the credits, Sioiixsie and
the Banshees at a masked ball, etc.)
is notewortliy because it isn t—it all
sounds, like, totally appropriate.
tapestry madness, cbandelier insanity, labyrinths of intricately pat-
terned wallpaper. A vast, voluptuous vortex of mirrors, moldings,
daybeds, candlesticks, cabinets, jeweled boxes. Bed, bath, and
motherfucking beyond. Coppola's unprecedented access to Ver-
sailles yields, in these early scenes, a strong image of a central
theme. Marie Antoinette is the story of a frivolous naif delivered
into and engulfed by an immense abstraction. In terms of sheer
stuff, few humans have ever had to process so much. Every motif
on the upholstery is significant; meaning adheres in tbe slightest
gradation of lavender. This empire of signs would boggle tbe brain
of Bartbes, let alone a semiliterate teenager.
And then there are the rituals of bathing, sleeping, dressing, eat-
ing, and sex that take up so much of Coppola's narrative. Each of
these processes is attended to by an unfathomable hierarchy of
court personages, an enormous entourage of in-laws, servants, and
ladies-in-waiting, each with bis or her own elaborate array of
duties, privileges, and rights of entry. Faced with this bewildering
system, and constitutionally disposed to distraction, Marie
Antoinette copes with spectacle by becoming spectacle. As tbe vast
macbinery of court life hums, its smallest gear effecting rotations on
the world stage, the Dauphine of France goes shopping. Marie
Antoinette takes Coppola's exuberance for fashion to the limit. Tbe
movie is never happier than in its montage scored to Bow Wow
Wow's "I Want Candy," a gut-busting buffet of luxury goods: feath-
erweight silks with diamond embroidery, couture pumps lined with
chinchilla, organic raspberries dipped in Cristal, geometric pastry
orgies worthy of Cremaster. Amidst all this nauseating fabulous-
ness, Coppola tucks a purple Chuck Taylor sneaker in the corner of
the frame, tee hee. You half expect the Count Mercy D'Argenteau
(Steve Coogan) to skip by with an iPod, but Coppola shrewdly lim-
its such gimmickry to a single sneaker. Her use of pop music (Gang
of Four over the credits, Siouxsie and the Banshees at a masked ball,
etc.) is noteworthy because it isn't—it all sounds, like, totally appro-
priate. Louis XVI's ascension to the throne is scored to the sublime
detonation of "Plainsong" by The Cure, a massive effect in an oth-
erwise modest soundscape.
Tbat Coppola makes New Order sound as "classical" as Gluck
is a splendid feat. But to what end? Here we are, in the most fan-
tastic of Rooms, and from all available evidence there's nothing
happening inside. Marie Antoinette comes to life when it's out al!
night, giddy on champagne and gambling till dawn, no job to
schlep to tomorrow or ever. The movie blisses out at the Petit Tri-
anon, the Queen's adorable country getaway (basically the Hamp-
tons). What are we supposed to do witb all this? Relate? Aspire?
Vomit? At a minimum, recognize that the film is most exact when
most radically frivolous. Apply that where you will—to the twi-
light of the American empire, the psychology of Sofia Coppola, tbe
latest Marc Jacobs collection. Andy Warbol once asked a friend
what he should paint. Paint the thing you like the most, came the
reply, and Warhol proceeded to paint money. D