Saturday,
October 21, 2006
Sofia Coppola Wastes Sympathy on
"Marie Antoinette"
The
ANNOTICO Report
Sofia
Coppola thinks the hated Marie Antoinette was an unfair victim of Xenophobia and Misogyny. Not the Pampered
Self Centered, Self Indulgent , Heartless, Extravagant,
Hedonistic, Adulterous, Sexually Omnivorous Misanthrope we have all believed.
:)
WHAT'S
ALL THIS ABOUT CONCEIT AND CAKE?
Antonia
Fraser's book sets the course of the film "Marie Antoinette" and the
record straight.
By
Rachel Abramowitz
Times Staff Writer
October 20, 2006
MYTH: When faced with the poor demanding bread, Marie Antoinette, the last
proper queen of France, uttered "Let them eat cake."
REALITY: Marie Antoinette never said it.
"It was first said about Louis XIV's wife. A
hundred years earlier. And then it was said about three other people in the
early 18th century. And then it got stuck with her," Lady Antonia Fraser
said, referring to Marie Antoinette. "It's not her character, because it's
callous and ignorant."
Fraser, the 74-year-old British doyenne of biography, spent five years
researching the extravagant, foolhardy, blighted and ultimately tragic life of
the queen, guillotined at 12:15 p.m. on Oct. 16, 1793, in front of what Fraser
describes in her biography of the queen as a "joyous public."
Although the book, "Marie Antoinette: The Journey," was published
five years ago, Fraser's take on one of history's most reviled w! omen is again attracting attention this time as the source material for
Sofia Coppola's new film, "Marie Antoinette." Fraser humanized a
phantom figure who's exerted a sway over the public
ever since she, the Austrian-born daughter of the emperor and empress of the
Holy Roman Empire, became the dauphine of
Why did they hate her so?
"Xenophobia. Misogyny.
Never to be ignored. And things getting bad in
"Marie Antoinette" is the first of her 11 nonfiction books to have
made it to the big screen. Coppola's candy-colored interpretation of the doomed
queen, with its 1980s New Wave soundtrack, makes use
of many memorable moments from Fraser's book, though it concentrates on Marie
Antoinette's extravagant, hedonistic youth. The film shows her to be the naive
pawn of her dominating mother, Empress Maria-Theresa, who has Marie Antoinette
married off to the nebbishy, socially awkward
dauphin, who is unable or unwilling to consummate the marriage for seven years.
Kirsten
Dunst's fresh-faced Marie Antoinette romps around
A few French critics booed when the film debuted at the Cannes Film Festival
and proceeded to gripe about Coppola's interpretation of the icon when the film
opened in wide release in France, but Fraser whose book is currently a bestseller
there seems pleased enough. "I
love the film," she said, smiling.
Fraser became aware of Coppola when she fished out the DVD of "The Virgin
Suicides" from her Oscar season stash. "I just happened to wat! ch
it, and I thought: 'There's a talent,' " Fraser said. A few weeks later,
Coppola, who'd read "Marie Antoinette" in manuscript, approached her
about making the movie. The literary veteran and the tyro director met in
During the course of filmmaking, the writer also acted as an Antoinette oracle
for some of the actors, such as Mary Nighy and Jason
Schwartzman, who crossed the Channel to discuss their characters. Schwartzman
plays Marie Antoinette's husband, Louis XVI, who was considerably portlier than
the vulnerable idiosyncratic star of "Rushmore" and "Shopgirl." "I thought, 'Wh! at's this attractive
man doing playing Louis XVI? And also, he's very well made, but he's not
totally fat and he kept saying he
had to eat, he had to eat," Fraser said. "But what I thought in the
film he captured was sort of a nerdy quality. Which is right."
Fraser's generous mien seems of a piece with her style as a biographer. She's
rigorous, painstakingly piecing together personality from scraps of memoir and
letters, sorting through biases and weighing context. Many of her subjects,
such as the wives of Henry VIII, were moons orbiting the lives of great men and
left scant writing of their own.
"I think I like looking at people who've been the subject of myth,
actually, and examining the myth and seeing what's real and what's false.
That's, I would say, my main motive. Curiosity," she said....
This month, Fraser's follow-up to "Marie Antoinette" is being
published. "Love and Louis XIV: The Women in the Life of the Sun
King" traces the complicated amor! ous entanglements of the gargantuan-appetitive
king as well as his relationships with other significant women, such as his
mother, Anne of Austria, and his sister-in-law, Henriette-Anne,
the Duchesse D'Orleans.
Compared with "Marie Antoinette," it's a positively sunny romp through
royal romance.
"Louis XIV was quite different from what I expected," she said.
"I did not expect to find this tremendous religious dimension. I expected
to write a book about sex. But not about sex and religion.
It's much more interesting."
The book is in some ways reminiscent of Fraser's "The Six Wives of Henry
VIII," but not as grim. After all, the French king didn't behead those who
disappointed. "I have a catch phrase," Fraser said with a twinkle.
"I'd rather be the mistress of Louis XIV than the wife of Henry the
VIII."
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