Jeff, if the movie is "well made", why do you hate it so much?

I haven't seen it, but having read about it a lot, isn't the shallowness, as you put it, part of Coppola's point? Or not?

I don't think it's that shallow. It's obviously a critique on the modern celebrity world, but it's also a critique on the modern hipster world. It's not shallow, it's about shallowness.

Camille Paglia is easily one of the most articulate and observant cultural observers of our times.

When I was in university, her pieces against political correctness were like manna from Heaven.

If I had to have an older woman, intellectual sexual fantasy...

Didn't mean to use 'observe' twice in a sentence there.

Damn Jim Beam...

Saw it. LOVED it. A brilliant film about the clothes not making the (wo)man, the neccessity and dangers of sociological bubbles, and the humanization of historical figures. Also has one of the best soundtracks in the history of cinema... but wouldn't expect Jeff to pick up on something that hip.

"Jeff, if the movie is "well made", why do you hate it so much?"

I take it he means technically well made, in a Memoirs of a Geisha way.

19th Century, you say?

Let's try the 18th Century.

Camille Paglia is like a godsend for conservative, anti-"feminism" Libertarians like me. She wrote this in a Salon article, referring to homosexual activists in 2001:

"This was a good example of the fascist policing of public discourse in this country by nominal liberals who have become as unthinkingly wedded to dogma as any junior member of the Spanish Inquisition."

Her writing on how feminism has infantilized women is breathtaking.

Let's see a movie on her, rather than Marie Antoinette.

Wow, I never realized how unthinkingly dogmatic my mutual respect for other human beings was. Thanks Camille!

Had Coppola really wanted to be daring, she should have actually cast Paris Hilton to play Marie. Now THAT I would have paid to see.

Can we all say at the same time "OVERRATED DIRECTOR"?

Are we talking about Wes Anderson, now?

Paglia is usually full of shit. Her defenses of Rush Limbaugh and gushing over Madonna make her opines highly suspect. While she scores in the meta-writing, her contrary obviousness reveals a shallow writer enthralled by pop culture blips.

blah blah...

Sofia Coppola is the most interesting, savy director working in movies today. Two critic friends who will write about the movie said is is "Brilliant, a joy." Scott Foundas of the LA weekly gets the movie too.

Film Let Them Eat Film
Tales of wars and misguided youth dominate Cannes 2006

By SCOTT FOUNDAS
Wednesday, May 31, 2006 - 6:00 pm

Marie Antoinette At the Cannes Film Festival, where fortunes can change more quickly than at the court of Versailles, Sophia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette arrived the odds-on favorite — buoyed by enthusiastic advance reviews in Paris, along with the sentimental possibility of history’s first father-daughter Palme d’Or winners — only to go home empty-handed. In between, there were those who wanted off with the head of Coppola and her rock-and-rococo biopic of France’s most notorious queen. While it’s impossible to know how many French nationals were among the small but vocal minority that booed Marie Antoinette’s first official press screening, it’s a fair bet that some Gallic viewers bristled at the film’s depiction of a time when Franco-American relations ran so strong that French troops and financial support were funneled into the American Revolution, even as France’s own economy teetered on the brink of collapse. But as Cannes wound on, there were critics of many nationalities who expressed disappointment with Coppola’s third feature film, bringing to mind one trusted colleague’s tried-and-true observation that sometimes people see a movie, but they don’t really see the movie.

In the case of Marie Antoinette, I suspect that many came to the film expecting one thing — perhaps the kind of dense, multicharacter historical epic Coppola père might have made — and didn’t know quite what to make of what they found instead. Don’t get me wrong: Marie Antoinette is a feast for the senses, shot on the grounds of Versailles, with hundreds of extras parading through the frame in candy-colored costumes by Oscar winner Milena Canonero. But the movie is less notable for its opulence than for its intimacy, as Coppola cuts through the rigid pomp and circumstance of so many period movies to create an irreverent snapshot of an impetuous young monarch (played with bubbly insouciance by Kirsten Dunst) more interested in haute couture and gossip among girlfriends than in the troubles of the nation that lies at her Manolo Blahnik–shod feet. Those who accused the film of failing as a study of 18th-century French politics missed Coppola’s point, for this Marie is a resolutely apolitical figure, not so much insensitive to the woes of pre-revolutionary France as ignorant to them, safely ensconced in a bubble of superficiality and decadence far from the madding crowd.

Daubed with anachronistic touches (including a soundtrack loaded with New Order, Bow Wow Wow and Gang of Four) that invigorate but never overwhelm, Marie Antoinette was, following the unqualified disaster of Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales, the one movie in this year’s Cannes competition that felt authentically hip and young and the product of a dazzling pop sensibility. It may also be Coppola’s most personal film to date, not because she is herself the scion of a royal Hollywood family, but rather because she came of age during her father’s lean years, when the palace of Zoetrope was set upon by angry creditors and King Francis was forced into working as a director-for-hire just to pay the bills. This is a movie made by someone who knows firsthand what it means to watch a once-glorious empire crumble.

Paglia is "suspect" of what, not being a brainwashed, follow-like-sheep, PC liberal? Who fetishize "sensitivity" to the point of de-masculinizing the world?

She speaks "truth to power", rebels against the status quo, and thinks for herself rather than letting fey, feminized, elite, pseudo-"liberal" automotons speak for her. Good for her. She's a real woman.

Best interview ever:

http://privat.ub.uib.no/BUBSY/playboy.htm

Saw Marie-Antoinette a few months ago in France and can only highly recommend it. U can see and feel the love that went into it in nearly every frame. So far one of the richest works this year.

Funny how some critics like you seem so repeled about its hipness. It´s such an open minded and courages piece of work. To act arrogant in front of it seems so stupid.

NYCBusyBody... I enjoy and, for the most part, agree with Paglia's perspsective on human sexuality (being the liberal automaton that I am). Frankly, however, she's a religious zealot with intellectually embarrassing thoughts on abortion and all other matters where the Church is involved. Even had she reviewed Marie Antoinette, I would have found it exceptionally difficult to care / strongly consider her opinion. What confounds me is that someone so sexually enlightened inspires her readers to use such antiquated terms as "real women," but if you ignore the gender spectrum and a host of other self-evident truths you might enjoy her writing. Sorry, really would rather be posting about Marie Antoinette and how much it clicked for me... will try to restrain myself from now on.

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Marie Antoinette
Cast: Kirsten Dunst, Jason Schwartzman, Judy Davis, Rip Torn, Rose Byrne, Asia Argento, Molly Shannon, Shirley Henderson, Danny Huston, Steve Coogan, Aurore Clément, Jamie Dornan, Marianne Faithfull, Guillaume Gallienne and Mary Nighy
Directed by: Sofia Coppola
Screenplay by: Sofia Coppola
Distributor: Columbia Pictures
Runtime: 123 min
Rating: PG-13
Year: 2006

All eyes will be on you." It is a warning Marie Antoinette's mind does not fathom because she is, after all, only a child when she is forced to leave friends, a cute little pug, and all of Austria behind to enter the court of Louis the XV. Greeted outside the gates of the royal palace in Versailles by the Comtesse de Noailles (Judy Davis), Marie Antoinette (Kirsten Dunst) hugs the woman, whose mortification is most visible in her severe neckline. This young girl will need molding, and implicit in her cold reception is the difficultly of her pilgrim's progress toward queenhood—a tragic funeral procession into a gilded confine where Marie Antoinette will be fashioned into something she is decidedly not and where her every movement will be so closely monitored that the clothes on her back will become not unlike mood rings, absorbing and representing the colors of the demoiselle's traumatized essence. The last shot of the film is telling: A beautiful, bejeweled bird, this girl will be ripped out of her cage, leaving only feathers and loads of crap behind.

Does empathy explain why Sofia Coppola took the story of Marie Antoinette as the follow-up to her greatly successful Lost in Translation? No other royal in history was so brutally and unforgivably held up for scrutiny, and no other female filmmaker has had her talent, privilege, and success so insensitively begrudged by critics, male and female alike. (Some are going so far as to contemplate a conspiracy in the latest issue of Film Comment, which features Dunst dolled up on the cover and an advertisement for Francis Ford Coppola's Diamond Collection wine on the back.) The prissy disdain for the vintage of Coppola's films in some circles could be described as an act of sexual terrorism—the kind that has conveniently spared Wes Anderson, another maker of eccentrically hermetic cine-artifacts—but Marie Antoinette is scarcely defensive, which is not to say that it is without meaning or that its commentary on its titular queen's rise and fall is not barbed.

I plead guilty to holding Coppola's soundtrack against Marie Antoinette, sight unseen, but now I have seen the light and it is as lucid as the rising sun Marie Antoinette takes in after a long birthday celebration, on a dawn that is noisy with the sound of friendly chatter and the clink of champagne glasses. Coppola's collection of mostly new wave and post-punk anthems, like the thoroughly modern performances she does not have to coax very hard out of her actors (only Marie Antoinette's young daughter speaks French in the film), serve as the director's great, often funny distancing effects—attempts to critically chart and define the space between us and the past but also to bring us closer to the truth. Smart and playful, the songs of Marie Antoinette illuminate the intricacies of a discouraged young woman's state of mind and being, from the horror of her initiation into a foreign world ("Jynweythek Ylow") to her thirst for material possessions ("I Want Candy").

Marie Antoinette compares favorably to The New World and, more so, to The Lost City—two tales of Edens stripped of their fruit. Andy Garcia's ode to his bygone Cuba had no room in its limited imagination for the country's impoverished masses, but that was because Garcia only understood what was taken away from his family. Coppola's vision is not so pathological: The poor (and their methods of execution) do not figure in her film because Marie Antoinette, like her equally juvenile king, Louis the XVI (Jason Schwartzman), had no concept of proletarian existence, holed up as they were inside their palace away from France's starving, unhappy populace. Their heartache is of a different sort: the horror of having their personal lives on constant display before a snippy and prying court, which prominently includes Molly Shannon and Shirley Henderson as very funny ladies in waiting and Asia Argento as the very cruel Madame du Barry, the cat to Dunst's canary.

Coppola is obsessed with Marie Antoinette's pleasure, holding out her hand and contriving for her a series of mini revolutions (she claps, to everyone's shock, after a court performance and, later, carries on an affair with a gorgeous and virile soldier) in order to hint at the girl's desire to react against that which was preordained—to carve out her own space away from the busy hands of oppression. Cynics will reduce these moments to feminist fiddling, but they are, in fact, very humane considerations of the corset-like effect ritual had on Marie Antoinette's will. The film is a great fashion show but it is also constitutes a great makeover—an elegy to frustration, where every color and sound evokes the longing and rapture of a girl who did not understand her adult responsibility. "Am I here?" the girl asks while playing the drinking game known to us as Celebrity. Her answer is implied later, when she bows to the barbarians outside her gate. It registers: "I am here." Remarkably, Coppola doesn't ask us to take Marie Antoinette as she thinks she was but as she probably was: a little girl who didn't know better.

Ed Gonzalez
© slant magazine, 2006.

The 44th New York Film Festival

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Aguirre,

"...she's a religious zealot with intellectually embarrassing thoughts on abortion and all other matters where the Church is involved."

Assuming your reference to 'the Church' is referring to what I am sure you mean to be the all encompassing, pure unbridaled evil, of the Roman Catholic Church, how is Camille Paglia a religious zealot, when she is in fact a practicing lesbian who has a lover?

Paglia is brilliant because while she identifies as a lesbian, she is also an independant enough thinker to understand religion, history, art and 'the Church's' role in it for the positive. She is attracted to women but does not buy into 'queer' or 'New Left' culture which just knee-jerk slams anything of 'the Church' as evil without either experiencing or understanding it.

That my friend, is intellectually embarrasing.

Paglia is a true thinker. I wish more university professors had her wit, intelligence and common sense. If she were more common among people who identified as 'liberal' we probably would have never had the culture wars and people like me would still consider themselves liberal.

Maybe we'd also turn out better students.

Paglia comments, in the interview linked to above, that "The happiest people I know are the women--like my cousins--who have a high school education, got married immediately graduating and never went to college. They are very religious and they never question their Catholicism. They do not regard the house as a prison." Her homosexuality aside (as I effusively endorse all civil lifestyles), I cannot put too much stock in the anthropological comments of someone who, for the masses, finds ignorance to be bliss. I may not be the happiest person in the world, but I'd rather be miserable for the truths I know, than euphoric for those I choose not to. That being said, I'm not nearly as familiar with her body of work as you and Busybody seem to be, and would be more than happy to revise my opinion if I were shown quotes of her's that negate the truly saddening one above. Moreover, the offense I take to those words should not suggest that I entirely discount her feminist theories, as I think she has some good ideas, but seems too burdened by the aforementioned ignorance to cohere them into something truly profound.

Remember, this is the same woman who thinks Rush Limbaugh is a true wit. For giving us the term "femi-nazi."

Plus, Paglia loves THE BIRDS way too much.

Okay, I take it back. Anyone who gives Rush Limbaugh - or The Birds, to some extent - cannot be taken seriously.

Okay, I take it back. Anyone who gives Rush Limbaugh - or The Birds, to some extent - any credit cannot be taken seriously.

Okay, I take it back. Anyone who gives Rush Limbaugh - or The Birds, to some extent - any credit cannot be taken seriously.

Aguirre,

I won't provide out of context quotes of paglia but I do recommend anyone read her.

For you to think all womem who are Catholic and happy are ignorant, is in fact a form of ignorance and predjudice.

Aguirre,

I won't provide out of context quotes of paglia but I do recommend anyone read her.

For you to think all women who are Catholic and happy are ignorant, is in fact a form of ignorance and predjudice.

Never did I even IMPLY that all women who are Catholic and happy are ignorant. She wrote that the happiest women she knows "NEVER QUESTIONED their Catholicism." To not question the tenants of your own faith (as it was thrust upon you by your upbringing), is the HEIGHT of ignorance.

Camille Paglia loves to challenge orthodoxy, from the left or right, and it can be fun to read her views. I like this one; she's exactly right.

" I love to listen to talk radio and have been doing it for years. But I'm frightened by what I'm hearing these days from commentators like Sean Hannity, whose program I listen to when I'm driving home from school. He's conservative, but I'm not -- I'm a libertarian Democrat who voted for Ralph Nader. These days I can't believe what I'm hearing, the gung-ho passion for war, the lofty sense of moral certitude, the complete obliviousness to the world outside our borders. How many people has Hannity known who aren't Americans? Has he ever been anywhere in the world? His knowledge of world history and culture seems thin at best. This is increasingly our problem as a nation -- we can't see beyond ourselves. It shows the abject failure of public education." -- Camille Paglia, February 7, 2003, Salon, before the invasion.

That's a good quote. Were she to appply it to her favored talk radio hater Rush Limbaugh, then I could take her seriously.

But maybe she knows Rush does leave the country....to procure whatever one procures in Dominican Republic when you're a repressed, hypocritical Christian conservative armed with a drug habit and unprescribed bottles of Viagra...