This big-ticket item at Cannes was met with such derision by French press that sour grapes didn’t begin to explain their reaction. When international press joined in, it seemed likely that the darling of Lost in Translation had being gorging on the cake of success with disastrous results. Based on Antonia Fraser’s best-selling biography, Sofia Coppola sought to cast a forgiving light on one of history’s most maligned royals. She cast Marie Antoinette as a cheerful teenager thrust into a cold, unknown world of ritual and expectation. This much might be true. Antoinette, the fifteenth daughter of an Austrian Emperor was married to France’s Louis XVI. Ruling from Versailles with little care or understanding of the growing rebellion, Louis and Antoinette lived a life of unbridled luxury.

In Coppola’s imagining, Marie seldom left the palace and wanted for nothing. Her spending habits suggested ruin yet this Antionette remained a happy little girl in an oversized dolls house, complete with the love of two good men. Almost immediately this trifling confection begins to melt under the weight of its sugary construction. The neo-punk introduction and contemporary score imply a timelessness to Antoinette’s difficulties. It simply undermines the period tone, already struggling with trans-Atlantic accents and a surplus of style. Sumptuous design is not enough to save a film that is as pretentious and dull-witted as the court gossip that propels its limited narrative. Refusing any sense of escalating tragedy that was to be Antionette’s fate, Coppola backs herself into a dramatic corner and responds with a payoff lighter than the infamous cake, reducing Marie Antoinette to little more than two hours of billowing schoolgirl fantasy.

// COLIN FRASER