Marie Antoinette: Girlhood in the Hall of Mirrors

Marie Antoinette is epic in detail, and that’s why it is beautiful. More than beautiful—delicious. (“Watch the flower,” Marie implores her brother Joseph, played by Danny Huston, pouring him jasmine tea. “Isn’t it divine?”) The director was granted unprecedented access to film in the Palace of Versailles (among other sets and locations around France); many hundreds of wigs and hairpieces were made for the production; and, other than the Easter egg of a pair of Chuck Taylors—just visible around the fifty-six-minute mark—period-evoking shoes were designed by Manolo Blahnik to adorn the feet of every cast member. On Coppola’s suggestion, costume designer Milena Canonero based her color schemes on a box of Ladurée macarons, pastels that interact across every aspect of the film’s production design with the director’s own mood board of 1980s New Romantic bands and John Galliano’s designs for Dior. When the newly arrived princess says, in an extended morning-dressing scene, “This is ridiculous,” the Comtesse de Noailles (Judy Davis) replies unequivocally: “This, madame, is Versailles.”

As so often happens with films that girls like, there is much else in Marie Antoinette’s recipe that remains critically underdiscussed. Coppola is known for bringing out unique, irreverent performances from her actors, and this film offers her the opportunity to work her usual sweet spot—ingenues cast alongside reputedly difficult cult figures—to its greatest effect in her filmography. Dunst, who first collaborated with Coppola on her feature debut, The Virgin Suicides (1999), and who is surely the director’s great muse, enters a new phase as an adult actor in this role. As we follow her Marie into the rabbit hole of Versailles, everything happens on her face; the actor’s expressions of supplication, glee, awe, and affection show the light touch of a performer playing a performer—until we see her misery when she is alone, and it’s like watching a different young woman altogether. In a film largely about an awkward adolescent relationship, Schwartzman is the perfect comic foil, the useless first boyfriend you can’t help but forgive. Making up the rest of the high school that is the French court, there’s the queen-bee fizz of Rose Byrne as the Duchesse de Polignac; the rugged out-of-placeness of Rip Torn as a randy Louis XV; the brittle authority of Davis, like Sèvres porcelain with a crack running through it. French actor Mathieu Amalric even pops up, like a wink to the fact that nearly everybody else is speaking with an American accent.

To dismiss Coppola’s images as fashion photography is to mistake one of her principal artistic influences for a limitation. That chaise longue shot was inspired by a sexy Guy Bourdin photo; later, in a tongue-in-cheek scene, we cut from the court women reading gossip rags to a fantastical vignette in which Marie says “Let them eat cake” in black lipstick, like a devilish Vogue Italia version of herself.

If saturated passages like these inhabit the collective dreamscape of Marie’s public image—a phenomenon compounded by the marketing of Coppola’s film—the dramatic events of her life unfold in a more leisurely, even painterly mode. The real story of Marie Antoinette takes place not under the flash of a bulb but in the light of a sunrise, the glow of candles, or the shadows of a room you’ve awoken in after a night that went on too long. We recognize Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon in Coppola’s scenes of gambling by candlelight; Marie’s seated bath recalls Marisa Berenson’s melancholy one in that film. Coppola has also cited filmmaker Terrence Malick’s influence, and we are back in the tonal rhythms of his Days of Heaven when Marie is in her shepherdess era in the palace gardens. Along with The Virgin Suicides, Marie Antoinette has proved an especial favorite of the online curators of Tumblr, Pinterest, and Instagram. It isn’t only because it is pretty that it lends itself so well to screencap culture; the director repeatedly uses as transitions composed frames that seem destined to be photographs, each a flash card for the highly romantic. Cinematographer Lance Acord, who had worked with the director since her short Lick the Star (1998), has described searching for the right combination of lenses, film stock, and lighting that would directly complement Canonero’s costumes. Canonero, who won an Oscar for her work here, had also designed the costumes (and won an Oscar) for Barry Lyndon, confirming the spiritual connection between the two films.

While we can trace such influences easily—Coppola is not shy about citing them—there is a bolt of modernity that flashes through Marie Antoinette like an electrical current. Music provides the pulse: supervised by Coppola’s longtime collaborator Brian Reitzell and filled with songs to be young to, the soundtrack ranges from the Cure to the Strokes to Adam and the Ants. And where Barry Lyndon operates at a tableau-like distance, Marie Antoinette achieves its power through emotional proximity. We are almost never separated from Marie, and rarely do we see things other than through her eyes. Coppola also uses the camera to highlight Marie’s increasing sense of alienation: she slowly pans backward from the figure of Marie alone on a balcony until she is a baby-blue speck in the distance, or lingers on Marie darkly considering herself in a mirror, with pink peonies just in frame.

In such instants, we experience Marie Antoinette as a contemporary horror movie that just happens to be set in the eighteenth century. In one of her lowest moments, Marie marches to her private chambers after the birth of an alternate heir to the throne, slamming her gilded door on the mounting gossip. Marie’s wail may be fully audible to anyone outside, but the pretense of feminine decorum has been maintained. Coppola immediately cuts to a giddily anachronistic shopping montage set to Bow Wow Wow’s “I Want Candy.” In the interplay between these scenes, we receive the director’s most expert expression of a thesis that runs through many of her films: What forms of pleasure and power can young women gain in a world that is set against them? They buy things. They confuse aesthetics with reality, and image with agency, because they must.

Marie Antoinette matters because of what it undoubtedly has brought about. What may have registered for some as style over substance in 2006 has been revealed, twenty years later, to be a total and rigorous cinematic method. Now, layering pop culture onto history is extremely common, almost expected, in period drama. At time of writing, Olivia Rodrigo is running through the Palace of Versailles in her knickers, speaking directly to the TikTok girls who obsessively watch cut-downs of Coppola’s film. Today, when pop stars need film culture and film stars act like pop stars, a video of Schwartzman spoofing MTV Cribs behind the scenes of Marie Antoinette plays more like a prophecy than a gag.

Coppola’s triumph here isn’t just that she takes a figure we know only by public reputation and brings her to the level of the personal. It’s that she takes the iconography itself—the shoes, the hair, the silk, the social currency—and makes it resonate with girls’ lives, as they are now and as they have always been. She plays with and on the surface of the image because she understands that images are never only images: they are femininity, desire, and power made legible. The director knows how to play that tune because she has always lived inside it. Though the film’s long influence on popular culture at large is undeniable, Marie Antoinette also stands apart in its own medium. Because cinema, despite being inherently visual and—now more than ever—fashion-adjacent, still tends to behave as though fashion, celebrity, and other forms of image-making exist outside its own vocabulary. Coppola makes no such pretense—she never has. Few films have answered the question of how aesthetics shape desire with such conviction—or such delight in slipping subversion into the mainstream, making it taste like candy.

Is Marie Antoinette a biopic? Its layers of mediation are almost too intricately woven to call it one. It is both of the form and not: subjective and strange. But for all its romanticism, it is the most lived-in-feeling of period dramas. The story ends, in a series of elegant sweeps, in the time it takes to hang and rehang a series of paintings: the death of one of Marie’s sons, the Women’s March on Versailles, and the eviction from the palace occur with blink-and-you’ll-miss-it swiftness. History gets rewritten all the time, and if Marie Antoinette ends quickly, it is a technique born of its source text, whose stated goal was to place as much attention on the royal’s early life as on her later sufferings. As Fraser writes: “The elegiac should have its place as well as the tragic, flowers and music as well as revolution and counterrevolution.” As Marie leaves Versailles for the final time, she sees one more dawn through the carriage window. We feel it won’t be her last—quite. But why hang on when the party is over?