Sofia Coppola cuts the head to Marie-Antoinette !

The "Marie-Antoinette" of Sofia Coppola is a total failure. We miss qualifying adjectives in the lexical field of the cinematographic disaster, to say how much this laborious film, of more than two hours, is what we saw of worse in the register of an American glance on the French History ! There is neither scenario, nor arises dramatic. The realization is without the least idea neither audacity, neither inventiveness, nor control, and pushes back, with each micro sequence, a little further the limits from the good taste and the propriety.

How to imagine that people of Cinema – I want to say people who claim to like and do Cinema – had the idea absurd to present this filmic tragedy in Cannes, to put this object beside films of authors, to call that differently that an insipid missed film for television, makes by a small little endowed American middle-class woman, who would have decided to make film like dad but without conviction nor no talent ?

"Marie-Antoinette" is a puerile film, without scenario, without setting in scene or point of view. Sofia Coppola films Versailles like she films a back-yard of fast-food. She looks at French architecture as something which she does not understand, which does not form part of her history. She sees Marie-Antoinette like an “under-Paris Hilton”, with her puppy on the arm, directs the Dauphine one, then the Queen, like a heroin of "Sex in the City" or of any bad sitcom.

There is not only one esthetical or a pretty scene during these twice sixty minutes, distressing of academism, of lethargy. Sofia Coppola does not seem to be able to make a correct framing !

Kirsten Dunst does what she can to seem Austrian, a little French, then Dauphine, then Queen. She is just shown unhappy, lonely, badly loved, lost in this world named Versailles.

We are like actress is : we are bored, we deplore, and in spite of the thousands of pastry makings and gildings, the beautiful crockery and the beautiful dresses, nothing there made, nothing does not come to fill the abyssal vacuum of this weak production !

I don’ always agree with the French actor Alain Delon – S. Coppola had proposed to him the role of the old King - but I understand why this last refused to take part in this masquerade which manages neither to divert, nor to move and even less to criticize anything of a universe however very favourable with a sour glance.

Sofia Coppola had to randomly choose, between two coffees, the name of "Marie-Antoinette" like next film subject, to lose itself at this point in the meanders of a crude documentation on the history of the French Royalty. Obviously S.C is not very interested by the subject and is not with the height to bring a relevant point of view on the Queen’s way of life, how she spent her money in festivals, masked balls, as landscape designer of the gardens of Versailles. The film equalizes the character supposed to represent Louis XVI : slackness and without savour, invisible, barren (during almost all the film) and insipid.

An American girl, "daughter of", makes fun of French by offering a large machine, a large pink gift vulgar candy and without relief, large dull meringue to pretence make Cinema.

"Marie-Antoinette" is an ashamed spectacle, absolutely indefensible. We don’t even dare to speak about the Rock’n’Roll soundtrack quickly coupled, and in arrhythmia, with the images which has a perfectly ridiculous and useless effect.

Sofia Coppola decapitated a historical figure without any compassion, without to have tried to include people, a time and a world. This unnamable film is the worst thing than we saw for a long time and we cannot imagine that this kind of turnip is the spearhead of a new cinema. The affront is large, as well with the History with the Cinema.

Sometimes, talented parents give birth to pretentious and degenerated short-sighted children. There is no heredity of the talent in the great families of Cinema. What it was necessary to show…

Frederic VIGNALE, In LE MAGUE JOURNAL (France)