Marie Antoinette

I caught the last 40 minutes of Marie Antoinette on TV the other night. I remember watching this and being very bored by it and by the end feeling very exasperated with both Marie and Sophia and kinda sorta being on the side of the peasants with pitchforks. I definitely remember being annoyed at the way it ended, partly because, to my peasant, pitchfork-wielding attitude, she got away scot free. The whole thing seemed like a boring dress-up movie.

But the end gets pretty good.

Sophia Coppolla is actually pretty adept at getting a certain kind of quality out of her actors, especially young women, and it's really satisfying to watch a movie that's well shot. And she's very good a getting a kind of lovely complicated sadness up on screen.

The camera is wistful, like a Mallick movie (actually this feels a little shot-for-shot New World). Kirsten Dunst's Marie is much more complicated and tired at this end of things, and there's a whole section near the end when things start to get really scary with scene after scene of no dialogue that is quite moving.

Also, that movie has really amazing dresses in it, which would cancel out all other concerns if it had to.