The late Derek Jarman (he is somehow always “the late Derek Jarman”, though it’s now 13 years since he died) had a phrase: “the cinema of small gestures”. In relation to his own work, this referred not to his feature films with their slightly-more-than-minuscule budgets, but to his constant production of super-eight movielets, using his friends and the places he frequented; they are small, allusive, mysterious, as highly personal as a dream.
The cinema of small gestures is a good way to describe the movies of writer-director Sophia Coppola, though her style is much less fractured than Jarman’s, and has more in common with the downplayed filmmaking ethos of Yasujiro Ozu or Jim Jarmusch. The emphasis is not on grand effects or big emotional moments, but on the accumulation of little events that make up ordinary life.
Coppola did well with her debut movie, The Virgin Suicides, and perfected her understated style with Lost in Translation. In her new film, Marie Antoinette, she both maintains this method and complicates it, with distinctly mixed results.
This is the story of the famously extravagant French queen, whom we all know ended her life on the guillotine of the French revolution. But Coppola wants to tell her tale in a way unlike the glamorous, sensationalist old movies that gave the role to larger-than-life stars such as Norma Shearer; she wants, it is clear, to show some of the ordinariness hidden inside an apparently extraordinary life.
So we have Marie Antoinette, at age 14, being packed off to marry the heir to the French throne, the Dauphin (later Louis XVI). She has to enter a tent on the border between Austria (her homeland) and France, where she is stripped of everything Austrian, including her little dog, before she can step forth as fiancée of the Dauphin.
Marie Antoinette is played by Kirsten Dunst, and the Dauphin by Adam Schwartzman, giving the whole thing a sly air of modernity, reinforced by the use of 1980s pop music — though the sets and the (Oscar-winning) clothes are all perfectly in period. In fact, Coppola shot much of the movie in Versailles itself, and she is one of the first directors to get permission to film in the actual palace of the French kings.
The intended contrast is between these lavish settings and the rather banal life to which Marie Antoinette is condemned, at least at the start. It’s more about banquets, fancy shoes and the stultifying royal ritual of Versailles than it is about matters of state — though the problems of the very inexperienced young couple are cause for international concern. No heir was forthcoming in the first seven years of their marriage, and this is the main issue that generates what tension the film possesses in its first hour or so.
It’s not much to go on, and by the time things start hotting up in the way of sexual infidelities and looming popular revolt, it’s rather late in the day for the viewer to get emotionally involved. It is interesting that the film plays out these “small gestures” against the lavish backdrop of Versailles, but for a lot of the time Dunst seems merely to be roaming its halls rather languidly in search of a plot-point.
The movie does its best to at least look beautiful, but your appreciation of that will depend on how much over-ornamented gilt decor you can take. Its narrative covers about 20 years, from Marie Antoinette’s arrival to her final departure from the palace, but she appears not to age, and there is no sense of how much time has passed — it’s as though it had all been a dream.
And, yes, we can dredge up some modicum of sympathy for this poor little rich girl with nothing to do but spend money and have parties, but not a lot. One feels sorrier about the pretty palace getting wrecked, which says something for the way the film’s inanimate objects have been allowed to upstage its people. A cinema of small gestures is all very well, and Marie Antoinette is a brave development on Coppola’s part, but we need less insipid characters, or more complex situations, if we are to care.
And, by the way, historically, Marie Antoinette was allowed to keep her dog.