Reseñas de la crítica

Depending on who you talk to, Marie Antoinette is as empty as an empty bottle of perfume, or as powerful as a multi-million-dollar ad campaign. What no one argues over: the target audience. Sofia Coppola makes films for young women, serves them up like cake and laces the icing with dissent. Marie Antoinette may look like it’s selling something, but it’s pushing revolution.

The movie is blissed out enough to come off as a two-hour brunch with the girls: all frivolous gossip and leisure, no substance. But that, of course, is the movie's premise. It was also one of the premises of Marie Antoinette's existence and a major factor in her death. It's the essence of Coppola's own style as a filmmaker to revel in moods and surfaces — not to obscure her characters' inner worlds or ignore their greater contexts, but rather to draw them out through a mere semblance of style.

With Coppola's films, sight and insight are inseparable from the start; her Marie Antoinette, the poor little rich girl of Versailles, bursts the bonds of historical cliché to become our sensitive, inspired, and constrained contemporary.

One of the reasons why Coppola's deliberate anachronisms work so well is that they're cultural items we can much more easily relate to than the stuffy and ridiculous daily rituals that make up the Dauphine's existence. That allows us to more closely align ourselves to Marie, who considered the French royalty's countless traditions as ludicrous and intractable.

A raucous and gilded period piece that completely upends the typical approach to such historical portraits, "Marie Antoinette" immediately confronts the most common understanding of the reviled young queen, watching her laze about under the crunching guitar riffs of Gang of Four's "Natural's Not In It.