France 1770, and Archduchess Antoine, an Austrian, is brought to the French court by Ambassadeur Mercy, to be married to Louis, the heir to the throne. She is renamed Marie Antoinette and becomes a source of fascination to the French populace, being mobbed by crowds at public appearances, although her marriage is not a success, she and Louis remaining distant. She is under constant pressure to produce an heir, but instead prefers the rich social life of the French aristocracy, being seen with young court members such as the Comtess Du Berry, the vulgar mistress of King Louis XV, and the Duchesse De Polignac, gambling at casinos and having the royal couturiers make ever more elaborate dresses, wigs and headgear, some seeing her actions as flaunting her wealth ostentatiously. The ailing King Louis XV finally dies, leaving Louis XVI to take the throne. Marie finally falls pregnant and gives birth to a daughter after a bizarre ceremony carried out in front of crowds of courtiers and other staff. She starts to spend more and more time away from Versailles, instead passing her time at the country residence of Le Petit Trianon, where she plays games pretending to be a simple milkmaid, and becomes involved in an affair with Count Fersen, a Swedish nobleman. Her mother, Empress Marie Teresa dies, and Marie finally produces a male heir to the throne, but although the country is pleased at the birth of a son to the royal household, the populace are becoming more and more unhappy with the Queen’s lavish and excessive spending and carousing, made worse by the country’s increasing economic problems, causing poverty for more and more French citizens. Seeing that royal offspring could boost her popularity, another son and daughter are born in quick succession, but her daughter dies after a couple of years, and her first son, the immediate heir, catches TB, dying at the age of seven. Marie is still revelling in her position and influence when the news comes that the Bastille has been stormed. The Revolution has begun, and her days are numbered.... Marie-Antoinette, the Austrian-born Queen of France, may have become famous for the phrase ‘Let them eat cake’ when told that the French peasants were starving because they had no bread, but nowadays the phrase has actually been attributed to philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseu. Nevertheless she was led to the guillotine in 1793. Which may have seemed a preferable fate to director Sofia Coppola after the fierce reaction to her film, nominally based on the biography by Antonia Fraser, at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival. Having won over the art-house crowd with her previous The Virgin Suicides and the excellent Lost In Translation, Coppola once more tells a story of detachment and alienation, as the young women at the heart of Suicides are isolated from the rest of the outside world, and the characters played by Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson are artificially exiled in a country they cannot, and do not try, to understand. Such is Kirsten Dunst’s Marie, isolated from the real world which is occurring outside the gates of Versailles or Le Petit Trianon, although much of the political insights which were at the heart of Fraser’s book have been jettisoned in favour of a look which is stunning in detail and a soundtrack which puts tracks by such bands as The Cure, Bow Wow Wow, Aphex Twin and even Adam And The Ants into the proceedings, emphasising that Marie and her friends are outsiders within French society, a point made with all the subtlety of a masonry drill. Coppola insists that the film shows the character in ‘an arc of innocence, decadence and maturity’, but she still behaves like an air-head valley girl, and the fact that she and all her friends sound American teenagers, with no attempt at any form of accent is jarring, and even the veteran Rip Torn, playing Louis XV, is encouraged to sound like a Brooklyn deli owner rather than French nobility. The script seems also to be taking a swipe at the cult of personality, as Marie objects when she hears ‘her’ disputed quote repeated to her, wondering why ‘they’ continue to persist that it was she who uttered it, a veiled attack on modern-day media to whom truth is merely another five-letter word and nothing to do with their job. Coppola shows that she can still compose a scene, and such historical events as the Queen’s indulgences at Le Petit Trianon, where she pretended to be a simple milkmaid, are beautifully depicted, even if her eventual capture by the French mob is underplayed and Monsieur Guillotine’s invention nowhere to be seen. The result plays like Versailles 90210, with an emphasis on Manola Blahnik shoes, so when Marie finally meets her off-screen fate, it’s really hard to summon much sympathy for her.