She lets them eat cake

Ahistoric, as nutritious as a pink cookie, Marie Antoinette is the biopic that America deserves. Certainly no one could have directed but Sofia Coppola. "I always liked that period of France, the 18th century, the white wigs,"she admitted recently. "I always thought that visually it was an interesting, fun period."

I take her word for it. Not for Coppola the earnest analogies between epochs that her contemporaries make as rehearsals for Academy Award ceremonies; Kirsten Dunst's Marie Antoinette makes Norma Shearer's look like Madame Defarge. This is a film of which the Bret Easton Ellis of Less Than Zero would have proud. Dunst is the blank, busty girl dancing to Bow Wow Wow and "Ceremony" in your hometown '80s club* (snuff makes a dandy substitute for cocaine). How telling that Coppola regards her most famous utterance -- "Let them eat cake!" in response to the starving millions clamoring for change -- as a distortion attributed to rabble-rousing newspapers. Rousseau is Dunst's Deepak Chopra, inspiring "soul-searching" of the pastoral kind: the young queen retreats to Triannon to tend lambs with her curly-haired moppet of a daughter; and compared to the bewigged intrigue of which the royal court at Versailles is composed, who could argue? The conclusion is moving in a manner not acknowledged by any of the reviews I've read: the emo King Louix XVI (a jowly Jason Schwartzman) and his queen impassively sit at their dinner table while outside the mob calls for their heads. It's like every eighties movie in which the parents confronted their errant children about throwing a block party while they were on vacation.

This is the kind of film which delivers on the frivolity of its trailer but whose frankly risible aims turn the stomach. It's not often I declare that I had a great time and hated myself afterwards. It's Coppola's most striking film to date, and -- for those who go for that kind of thing -- the demonstrably auteurist statement her father has (to date) never made.

*Coppola scores the coronation of Louis XVI to The Cure's "Plainsong": she reveals the pubescent will-to-power obscured by its huge synth-swell intro. "Mope-rock" feh.