I feel compelled to write today for several reasons:
1) I haven’t written in an awful long time.
2) Even in my absence, I’ve continued to get a fair number of hits per day.
3) I’ve gotten two positive comments in the past week, and
4) I have something to write about.
What is that something? Well, if you read the title of this post, it should be obvious, Sofia Coppola’s 2006 film Marie Antoinette. Quite a while ago, I stated on this blog that I was really looking forward to this film, but I never got to see it in the theaters. I think it came out around the time that I was starting school, so I was just way to busy to get to the theaters much in those days. When it showed up on Netflix, I was again psyched even though the film disappeared from public consciousness fairly abruptly and got fair to middling reviews.
Frankly, I loved the movie. I want to write “stunned,” but it wasn’t really that. The film is a little bit too much of a music video to have the *pop* of a stunner, and I kind of knew what was coming; but it’s certainly good, much better than Coppola’s last film Lost in Translation, which I now view as a total snoozefest; and probably better than the Virgin Suicides, which I only saw a long time ago in the theaters, but which I remember being similarly snoozeworthy.
Marie Antoinette is flat in many ways, meaning that it’s all about surfaces, emptiness, the waning of affect, etc, but it’s a monumental and engrossing flatness. The cinematography is wonderful, the costumes are gorgeous, the men and women in the film are hot. It’s really great. It’s clearly a homage to a lot of past filmmakers and films, in particular, Kubrick’s middle- and late-periods, all sorts of surrealist filmmaking, and especially Josef von Sternberg’s great and underappreciated Scarlet Empress. So many elements of that latter film are lifted wholesale that Marie Antoinette often just feels like a remake recast in France instead of Russia. Certainly, the new film is probably just as much of a fantasy as Sternberg’s classic, but to me, that was the whole point. There are far too few pure fantasies projected on screen anymore (in the phantasmic, ghostly, mystical, magical sense), and to me, that’s a loss for cinema, especially the independent cinema, which is now so totally obsessed with secular realism. The choice of Marie Antoinette as the subject of this fantasy is historically and politically fascinating, as is the visual and sonic milieu into which Coppola injects her. Admittedly, it was probably going to be hard for any movie that includes songs from New Order, Aphex Twin, Gang of Four, and the Cure, among others, to really disappoint, but this one certainly didn’t, and it went beyond all that to truly impress me.
I would like to write more about the film, and more of substance. I jotted this stuff down very hastily, but I really need to do some work before I go out tonight to see Acid Mothers Temple. Psyched for that . . . Might write on it later.
