By Marie Antoinette
Year – 2006
From director Sofia Coppola (Lost in Translation) comes this highly stylized bio-pic. And the keyword here is “stylized”. In fact, were it possible, I’d have written the word “stylized” using a jelly-pen, bedazzeled it and then dotted the “i” with a heart. Or a smiley face. Is there room for both? Oh, why must there only be one “i” in “stylized”?
Unlike many bio-pics that are concerned with pesky things like “authenticity” or “historical accuracy”, Marie Antoinette will have none of that. Instead we get montages of wealth and gambling and flirting as if the Queen of France had been recast as Paris Hilton. (A dated reference now but in 2006 it made a modicum of sense, I suppose.)
However, in order to further extract her story from the stuffy confines of history, Coppola opted to use a modern soundtrack full of acts such as New Order, The Cure, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Bow Wow Wow, Adam and the Ants, and The Strokes.