One of the nice things about our one-and-a-half run local theatre happens during this stretch of the year. While horror quickies and Oscar hopefuls crowd the multiplex marquees, we're treated to big screen showings of an improbable array of flicks just before they hit DVD--at two bucks a pop. Which may explain how it is that in the past month the cinetrix has seen Casino Royale, Borat [hey, the 'Fesser and a friend had missed out], and [finally] Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette.
So what do you call it when the third film is the sophomore slump? Either the Germans or Pat Riley must have a word for it.
Such a disappointment, this one. Kirsten Dunst is astonishingly beautiful here and wonderfully photographed, but the film is incredibly inert. I get that Coppola probably wanted viewers to experience the regimentation and tedium of the Austrian's life in the court of France. And the static, repetitive sequences of the Dauphins dining together are funny and clever. But they aren't tight enough. To make her point Coppola'd need more of the fearful symmetry of a Kubrick, I'm afraid. Also, just because we all know what happened to Marie Antoinette doesn't mean story can be dispensed with altogether. And it isn't entirely, but the script is starlet-slight.
Thus, there are the many great players who go criminally underused. Judy Davis is all tendoned neck and clenched jaw. Steve Coogan appears to have nicked an aging Prince Valiant's coiffure. Luminaries like Danny Huston, Rip Torn, Shirley Henderson, even Asia Argento, are all left in the lurch, gamely throwing bits of business into the candy-colored void. Poor Mathieu Almaric gets only a blink-and-you-miss-him cameo. And the hungry citizens, when they finally appear in the final reel, show up so suddenly as to seem a flash mob.
Of course, the fashion is divine. The music, not so much. Here's what I mean. Music supervisor Brian Reitzell has done another stellar job of selecting hipper-than-thou tracks, but all too often how Coppola chooses to marry their sputtering energy to her languid imagery feels a half-beat off. [No mean trick in 4-4 time.] It's as though her delight in their sheer anachronism has turned her ear to tin. For a picture that relies so heavily on affect over event, this failed marriage between sound and image is nothing less than a tragedy.
The teaser trailers are everything the film should be, and isn't. Tant pis. Harnessing the headlong, propulsive precision of post punk to Antoinette's giddy swirl of girlyness would have held the movie together and given it the epic shape and towering grandeur of one of the young queen's coiffures. Instead, it falls flat.
