Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 11/02/19

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Saturday, November 2, 2019

Marie Antoinette (Sofia Coppola, 2006)

Marie Antoinette (Sofia Coppola, 2006)

Cast: Kirsten Dunst, Jason Schwartzman, Judy Davis, Rip Torn, Steve Coogan, Rose Byrne, Asia Argento, Molly Shannon, Shirley Henderson, Danny Huston, Marianne Faithfull, Jamie Dornan, Aurore Clément, Tom Hardy. Screenplay: Sofia Coppola. Cinematography: Lance Acord. Production design: K.K. Barrett. Film editing: Sarah Flack. Costume design: Milena Canonero. Music: Dustin O'Halloran.

I fear that Yorgos Lanthimos's The Favourite (2018) has spoiled the historical costume drama for me, even the ones that like Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette take an irreverent, somewhat tongue-in-cheek approach to the material. Lanthimos deconstructed the genre in his film, while Coppola merely mocks it behind its back, lavishing the resources of costume and setting while setting up a few cognitive dissonances by using contemporary pop music in the background. Her courtiers sometimes behave more like spoiled rich kids than like 18th-century aristocrats, which is very much to the point she's making. I just wish she'd had the nerve to take it further, the way Lanthimos did. Still, it's full of grand eye candy with its luxurious scenes set at Versailles, and Kirsten Dunst is a charming performer. It's slightly overlong, even though it crams the fall of the aristos into a scant quarter of the film, never letting us glimpse a tumbril or a guillotine but instead mostly having the news of the revolution brought to us by messengers and summed up in a final shot of Marie's ruined bedroom après le déluge.