Marie Antoinette (2006 film)

Marie Antoinette is a 2006 historical comedy drama film written and directed by Sofia Coppola and is based on the life of the Queen in the years leading up to the French Revolution.

Sofia Coppola

Coppola is an American screenwriter, director, producer and actress. She is famous for her films such as Lost in translation. She has a beautiful eye for looking at things in a different light and within the film Marie Antoinette, she really highlighted the sweetness and spoilt Queen and the destruction that became of her. 

Marie Antoinette

Marie Antoinette, played by Kirsten Dunst, used her unique personal style to defy the unyielding decorum and scheming courtiers of Versailles.

Sofia Coppola’s film Marie Antoinette, covering the nineteen years that magnificent and tragic woman spent at Versailles, created a sensation when it was presented in France. It was filmed largely on location in the palace, with unwavering support from the directors of the museum. This really gave the film a feel like it was real. The two leading actors, Kirsten Dunst, as the young queen and Coppola’s cousin Jason Schwartzman as King Louis XVI, it must have been an experience to walk in the beautiful silk garments and heels through the halls filled with the ghosts of the real people. For Dunst, exquisitely but unstuffily costumed by Milena Canonero (who deserves an Oscar for this work), it was a very sensual role.

“You breathe differently in those dresses; you move in a special way,” Dunst says. And to prepare herself, on the night the crew was filming the emotional balcony scene, she walked alone through the palace in the dark and said, “I could look in those mirrors,” she says. “Be still in myself. Feel my place in that house.”

Coppola was aware that her film is controversial and that people, especially in France, either saw the queen as a saint and martyr or genuinely hated her. But Coppola overlooked all that and brought her own Marie Antoinette to life.

In this film, the history of Marie Antoinette is seen from a very feminine and young woman’s point of view. The queen’s love of fashion particularly interested Coppola. “You’re considered superficial and silly if you’re interested in fashion,” Coppola says. “But I think you can be substantial and still be interested in frivolity. The girl in Lost in Translation is just about to figure out a way of finding herself, but she hasn’t yet. In this film she makes the next step. I feel that Marie Antoinette is a very creative person.”

The History

In 1770, the fourteen-year-old Archduchess Marie Antoinette left her home in Austria and travelled to meet her fifteen-year-old fiancé, the dauphin, heir to the throne of France.

She was an attractive young thing, with her blonde hair, blue eyes, and pale skin. She was the fifteenth child of a difficult mother, the Empress Maria Theresa, who led her huge empire so efficiently that she went on reading state papers while she was giving birth!

At the last minute, it had been revealed that the future bride (who liked dancing and playing with children and dolls) could barely read and write. Her mother had arranged for a ‘crash’ education and a makeover, including cosmetic dentistry, a less regional hairdo, and a complete new wardrobe of French-style clothes.

The young Marie rolled through the forest in a special gilded coach with gold roses, asymbol of the Hapsburgs, and lilies, a symbol of the Bourbons. Behind the huge glass windows she was like a jewel in a padded case. Her mother had warned her, all eyes would be upon her, and she should do what she was told.

“The journey went like clockwork; the Austrian court followed her in 56 other vehicles. To pull the carriages in relays, 20,000 horses were posted along the route. In a temporary pavilion on an island in the middle of the Rhine, the Austrian princess said goodbye to her mother’s courtiers.”

When she was handed over, highborn ladies from the French court of Versailles stripped her of every stitch of clothing and dressed her in clothes that would make her a dauphine. Her new ‘trousseau’ was distributed as ‘perks’ among her well-born attendants and they even took her little lapdog, Mops, out of her arms! That scene in the film really got to me, ther was no need to take the poor puppy! However, Some kindly soul arranged for them to be reunited after she was settled in her new home!

She had one job ahead of her, really: to secure the power of the French state and the alliance with her native land, and by giving birth to a future dauphin. But here there was a problem more fatal to her life story than any other, for seven years of  her marriage to Louis was unconsummated and she remained a virgin. On their wedding night, the teenagers were dressed in their nightclothes and then climbed into the great state bed in the presence of the king, and every courtier who could obtain entry, before they were finally left alone behind the curtains. But there were no secrets at Versailles, and the whole court soon knew that nothing had happened.

She found an increasingly confident personal style to use as a weapon against her enemies at court. In alliance with creative people—her architects, landscape designers, and most notably the couturier Rose Bertin and the hairdresser Léonard—she made the Trianon and her own person as exquisite as could be. “She had a great passion,” said the memoirist the Comtesse de Boigne, “and that was for fashion. She dressed to be in fashion, she got into debt for fashion, she was witty and a flirt—all to be in fashion.” She liked to dazzle with the very best outfit at her own costume balls; she enjoyed the buzz about her tall hairdo when she appeared at her box in the theater in Paris. She and her friend the Princesse de Lamballe were the talk of the town when they appeared in the Bois de Boulogne for a winter sleigh ride—two blondes, all in white, with diamonds and furs. 

With all this in mind I want to create a look that would make the young Marie proud and share her passion for fashion and huge hair doo's. Looking into her past has made me have a greater understanding for her life and her turmoil’s and how she tried to make herself feel even a little better by being creative. This is one of the many things that made her famous and I want to think of her being the main fashion icon of her time.

Overall this film Higlights the key points in Marie's life all the turmoil and all the fun she had. Its colouing throughout the film is of lush colours and I want to highlight this within my own work. The reason I think Coppola presented her in this way in the film is because she felt sorry for her, she was made to do things at such a young age, and never had the mind set to help rule a country. She was a young and creative sprit and an inspiration in her this aspect.




Information found:

http://www.vogue.com/865326/kirsten-dunst-teen-queen/