We're all tired of hearing

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We're all tired of hearing that Sofia Coppola's Marie-Antoinette (Columbia, 10.13), which will play at the Cannes Film Festival in mid May, is going to be a stylized take on the life of the young Austrian-born woman (Kirsten Dunst) who became the Paris Hilton of her day when she married King Louis XVI (Jason Schwartzman), and not a "historically accurate" capturing of any kind except for the 18th Century sets, clothes and hairstyles. What's instructive, perhaps, is that before deciding to use Lady Antonia Fraser's biography of the ill-fated empty vessel and party girl --"Marie Antoinette: The Journey," which adopts a view that Antoinette was misunderstood and suffered some tough breaks and met her demise with a touch of class -- that Coppola first considered using Stefan Zweig's "Marie Antoinette: The Portrait of an Average Woman," but then decided it was "too severe" for her. Judgment-wise, did she mean? Zweig's book declared that Antoinette was "flawed, egotistic, intellectually limited and indiscreet...her greatest passions were for clothes, vast flowery gardens, [fancy] jewelry and good-looking Swedish men; she was a compulsive spendthrift; her political self-awareness was zero and her policy meddling was uniformly disastrous." Whereas Coppola, it seems clear, is looking to cut the girl a break. "I've always loved the story of Marie-Antoinette and the decadence of Versailles on the brink of revolution, and the fact she was just a teenager when circumstances forced her to play a significant role in history," she said last year. "Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette were lost children in a crazy world...Marie-Antoinette was just in the wrong place, at the wrong time." Like I said weeks ago, I'll be willing to roll with this sympathetic confection (which is apparently scored with pop music tunes in the vein of A Knight's Tale) if Coppola gives us a nice, blood-spattered head-dropping-into-the-basket shot when it comes to the guillotine sequence...like Andrezj Wajda did with the executions in Danton.