Worst period movie in history

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obviously you dont understand that this film was not supposed to be a historical drama like the affair of the necklace. the film is about seeing marie antoinette through a perspective of a young woman(could say child since she was 15 in the film) and how she see's herself in her own beautiful prison of Versailles.

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I do love Zweig's biography, and I also love the 1938 film that was based on it. But I also love this treatment by Sophia Coppola. True, it is not done on the momentous scale of the golden age, MGM epic, which follows the Queen's life rite up to the guillotine with much pomp and circumstance. Rather, it gives us a series of snapshots, a few fleeting glimpses into the queen's character. In my OPINION, that approach is no less interesting.

What I am somewhat baffled by is your affinity for "The Affair of the Necklace." I don't mind that movie. I even like it. It certainly has it's strengths (and its weaknesses). But, aside from a very memorable execution scene, I don't think it gives much insight into Marie Antoinette's true character at all. Having read Zweig's biography (which is very much in tune with what Coppola was trying to do, in terms of celebrating rococo opulence while also humanizing Antoinette), I don't see how you could possibly consider "The Affair of the Neckless" the end all of Marie Antoinette representations. Joely Richardson does a great job with the material she is given to work with, and physically, could have stepped right out of a Vigee Lebrun portrait. But the script simply doesn't flesh out Marie Antoinette. She comes across as vapid, callous and haughty. In truth, she was at times all of those things...but also so much more. Granted, she was also more than the misunderstood party-girl that Coppola gives us, and yes, the 1938 movie is certainly the most extensive portrayal of the three.

As far as the affair of the necklace goes, the three chapters which Zweig devotes to the incident are much more enthralling than the whole of the movie. And I think the affair would have been completely out of touch with what Coppola was trying to do, which was (among other things) to give us a very insular view of Marie Antoinette's world. What was happening outside Marie Antoinette's every-day life was very deliberately, and affectively excluded from this interpretation.

it's up there







so many movies, so little time

I thought the movie was a triumph of Style over Substance. I didn't care if it had a story (although I could tell what was happening), I just thought it had a look and a pace that made it stand out from something like, say, Se7en, which is a perfectly fine movie.

You mean one of the best

The only reason I watched it was to enjoy the costume porn. The story was very thin and lame, and they didn't really portray anything about Marie's life accurately beyond the idea that she was a sweet, ignorant princess who had no idea how treacherous the world she'd been thrust into at Versailles could truly be.