The film, shot on location at Versailles, is being thrown an extraordinary 20th birthday party<\/a>. Scenes and sets have been recreated in the very rooms where the teenage queen (played in the film by Kirsten Dunst) once escaped the rigid hierarchies of court life.<\/p>\n In this mingling of fact and fantasy, visitors encounter Marie Antoinette\u2019s real S\u00e8vres dinner service. Alongside it are the elaborate food props created for Coppola\u2019s film by art director Anne Seibel and Michelin-starred chef Marc Meneau. Portraits of Marie Antoinette by \u00c9lisabeth Vig\u00e9e Le Brun<\/a> hang alongside mannequins styled to resemble Dunst. <\/p>\n More than 200 films have been shot on location in and around the buildings and grounds of Versailles, but this is the first exhibition dedicated to a single film.<\/p>\n Coppola worked with curators Laurent Salom\u00e9 and H\u00e9l\u00e8ne Delalex on the exhibition\u2019s artistic conception. The result is an extraordinary and uncanny experience: the Petit Trianon filtered through the dual sensibilities of filmmaker and queen. <\/p>\n Here, visitors see with particular clarity how both women constructed cloistered worlds designed to nourish a sense of self and preserve girlish pleasure. At the same time, both relied \u2013 perhaps too much \u2013 on privilege and image to sustain them.<\/p>\n Coppola\u2019s Marie Antoinette was booed at its opening screening<\/a> at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2006. It flopped commercially, barely breaking even on its US$40 million (\u00a321.7 million) budget. Coppola did not make another film for four years.<\/p>\n It is all the more gratifying for fans of the film, then, to see it grow in stature and appreciation. On its 20th anniversary, Marie Antoinette is receiving renewed attention and, finally, the cultural prestige that I believe its audacity warrants. <\/p>\n Criterion has released a 4K digital restoration in its prestigious collection, accompanied by voice-over commentaries, deleted scenes and an essay by girlhood scholar Claire Healy. Directed by Sofia\u2019s mother, Eleanor Coppola, The Making of Marie-Antoinette<\/a> will be released in November.<\/p>\n Why, then, two decades on, is Sofia Coppola\u2019s film receiving the popular and critical recognition it deserves \u2013 celebrating its audacious decision to tell the story of an 18th-century queen through a pop-art lens?<\/p>\n Part of the answer is that she anticipated a mode of historical fantasy that has since become mainstream: the deliberately trashy Regency of Bridgerton<\/a> (2020), the tongue-in-cheek profanity of the Russian court in The Great (2020), and the gleefully revisionist 18th-century world of The Favourite (2018). <\/p>\n But it is not simply that Coppola\u2019s playful postmodernism has become more culturally legible. She announced her intentions with extraordinary clarity from the very beginning. <\/p>\n The film opens on a black screen, the credits appearing in hot pink. Natural\u2019s Not in It<\/a> by Gang of Four plays (\u201cI do love a new purchase \/ a market of the senses\u201d) as the sequence cuts to a tableau. <\/p>\n Dunst, dressed in a white silk corset and petticoats, white feathers plumed in her hair, reclines on a dove-grey chaise longue. A maid places a shoe on her outstretched foot, while she lazily scoops a fingerful of thick pink icing from a cake beside her. <\/p>\nAhead of its time<\/h2>\n
Playful postmodernism<\/h2>\n
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