‘Marie Antoinette’ and Sofia Coppola’s dynamic use of historical revisionism and purple Converse
There’s a shot in Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette in which a pair of dirty purple Converse flits into frame amidst the pristine clutter of 18th-century life, briefly appearing during a decadent montage as Kirsten Dunst indulges in a series of dainty-looking cakes. It’s a blink and you’ll miss it moment, but its fleeting presence points towards the often-overlooked heart of Coppola’s vision, with the film being sorely criticised for its girlish visual style and alleged superficiality. However, the subtle presence of these out-of-place shoes, almost baiting us at the edge of the frame, perfectly encapsulates the misunderstood genius of the film and Coppola’s quest to make room for girlhood and the female perspective in stories where it has traditionally been erased.
Marie Antoinette is a retelling of France’s most iconic yet tragic queen, beginning at her betrothal and marriage to Louis XVI at 15, to her eventual reign as queen at 19, ultimately leading to the fall of Versailles. However, Coppola exercises some creative freedom over history, accompanying the story of luxury and excess with a post-punk soundtrack and shoegazy visual style. The gorgeously decorated sets and elaborate costumes capture the beauty yet suffocating lifestyle of the queen, who was adored for her beauty before the French people began to hate her for her decadence, leading to her real-life execution.
Through her earlier feature The Virgin Suicides, an adaptation of the classic novel by Jeffrey Eugenides, Coppola showed a deft ability to capture moods and feelings through an evocative visual style. The melancholic hue of adolescence is reflected in the colour palette and set decor of The Virgin Suicides, establishing the lonely interior worlds of the Lisbon daughters. Alongside this, the dreamy space pop soundtrack and depiction of objects/spaces helped bring to life a certain essence of girlhood that has rarely been given space on screen.
Whether it be the image of underwear draped over a crucifix or a messy bathroom littered with dusty eyeshadow palettes and red lipstick tubes, Coppola’s ability to create immersive visual worlds and flesh out the spaces of her characters has been crucial to her work. Her strengths as a filmmaker lie in her ability to create emotion through each meticulously arranged frame.
While this forms a core part of the nostalgic haze and looming feeling of decay in The Virgin Suicides, she uses this in differently in Marie Antoinette, highlighting how the queen was brought to Versailles to exist as a decorative object, confined to the walls of the intricate palace and not offered a life outside of the gilded cage. From the age of 15, Marie Antoinette’s purpose hinged around her beauty and ability to bear children, leading her to a meaningless existence that solely revolved around the one intent of looking beautiful and owning beautiful things.
Coppola is very much critiquing the lifestyle that was thrust onto her as a child, concerning herself with the space that exists between women, the worlds they inhabit and the world’s perception of them. In the case of Marie Antoinette, she was trapped in a world that did not value her thoughts or mind, but instead encouraged her to exist as a symbol, a symbol that was eventually destroyed after it no longer served those who created it.
Antoinette was famously quoted as having said, “Let them eat cake!” after discovering that the French people were starving while she was feasting to her heart’s content, every day. As a result, Antoinette is one of the most hated and controversial members of French royalty, with her subjects growing disdainful as they became poorer and she continued the same lavish lifestyle.
However, when closely reading about Antoinette’s life and the expectations placed on her, as well as the lack of freedom that led her to rotting away under the veneer of pearls and luxurious outfits in an empty palace, you can make a case for how unfair this witch hunt was. Coppola plays on the absurdity of her persecution through her retelling of Antoinette’s story from the perspective of the young girl she was.
While history books have indicted and mocked Antoinette, Coppola highlights the failures of the system around her and the former’s methods of dealing with entrapment. Her extravagance when purchasing new clothes and hosting lavish parties was the only freedom she could exercise, with the director making space for her bubble and a perspective that was never given any thought. Given that her interiority has been erased from history, Coppola revises this tale through her modern gaze to make room for a woman who was harshly treated, injecting a scathing sense of satire into the story to show just how obscene her life was in terms of the wealth vis a vis a starving peoples and the extreme demands made of her limiting existence.
Through Coppola’s lens, Antoinette becomes a young woman who is simply trying to get by within a system that has cheated her of her agency, shrugging in the face of injustice and deciding that, after all, she might as well have fun. While the Converse has been debated, the fleeting presence of these shoes highlights this very fact, reminding us that in the face of ludicrous luxuries and responsibility, she was just a teenage girl rebelling as best she could.
