Portrait of a lady: Sofia Coppola and Marie Antoinette

Sofia Coppola has style. Her first two features – The Virgin Suicides (1999) and the multi-award-winning Lost in Translation (2003) – were smart and distinctly personal: not surprisingly, given her credentials. She is a member of the film-making dynasty headed by her father Francis Ford Coppola, one of the ‘movie brat’ generation who helped to change Hollywood in the I960s and I970s, and who continues to nurture young talent through his company American Zoetrope.

Sofia is associated with a new creative elite that crosses several areas of popular culture: music, fashion, art and film. She set up her own fashion label Milk Fed in 1995 with childhood chum Stephanie Hayman and is credited with being the artistic inspiration for fashion designer Marc Jacobs, another of her friends. Francis Ford, who has a successful second career as a vintner, named a range of wines after her, and she now has her own line of sparkling rose, prettily packaged in pink. Once married to director Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation), Sofia is currently with Thomas Mars of the French band Phoenix, who feature on the soundtrack of Lost in Translation and perform in her latest film Marie Antoinette. She directs, produces and appears in music videos, and though her performance as Mary Corleone in The Godfather: Part III (1990) won an unnecessarily hostile reception, she went on to co-produce and copresent (with Zoe Cassavetes, daughter of John) the zany cable talk-show Hi Octane (1994). She still occasionally acts in movies (most recently in brother Roman’s 2001 sci-fi fantasy CQ). Add to this her artschool background, her appearances in Vogue and Vanity Fair and her costume design credits (for Francis Ford’s segment of New York Stories, 1989, and the time-travel comedy The Spirit of ‘76, 1990) and her profile as cool style icon is complete.

It is, perhaps, this combination of celebrity status, privilege and talent that causes some to regard Sofia Coppola’s achievements with ambivalence. After all, where would she be without her father’s protection and her cushioned lifestyle? This is, however, to miss the point. While she is no doubt more fortunate than many, she has made the most, in creative terms, of her opportunities. Indeed, Sofia Coppola is to be admired for forging a distinctive identity in spite of her father’s colossal reputation as a major player in US cinema.

It may be no coincidence that all her feature films to date deal in some way with relationships between youth and age: in The Virgin Suicides the bond between the teenage girls and their parents is characterised by lack of communication and covert rebellion; in Lost in Translation young newlywed Charlotte and jaded movie star Bob Harris discover something about themselves from each other; in Marie Antoinette the teenage queen learns to negotiate and master the stuffy, age-old rituals governing the Versailles court. All three movies tackle problems of youthful identity, borrowing elements of the teen-pic such as the rites-of-passage narrative and contemporary-music soundtrack but giving it an arthouse, European flavour.

Unlike many teen-pics, The Virgin Suicides is not nostalgic. Beneath its glowing, dreamy images is something dark and desperate that lies secreted in suburban American life, evading rational explanation. In Lost in Translation the American protagonists are aimless and isolated, thrown together by their inability to connect with a foreign culture. Marie Antoinette ostensibly deals with an Austrian heroine lost in 18th century France, but the accents are mostly American and it has been suggested that Coppola identifies with the naive young woman who has no idea what fate holds in store.

While these films are not directly autobiographical, they are deliberately idiosyncratic. Friends and family make cameo appearances and Coppola does not discourage the idea that viewers may read personal inferences into the characters and storylines. There is a tension in her work between the observational distance of documentary and the intimacy of home movies – indeed she has claimed, perhaps disingenuously, that she makes her films primarily for her family and friends rather than for the outside world.

The sense of living and working in a bubble disconnected from harsh reality is what some find difficult to take, yet the dilemmas of this situation are precisely those dramatised in the films themselves, all of which wrestle with the extent to which identity is of our own making or imposed by others. This existential problem has preoccupied filmmakers from Hitchcock to Scorsese. The comparison may seem perverse, but Scorsese’s explorations of the psyches of Jake La Motta or Jesus Christ have something in common with Coppola’s treatment of her trapped heroines. Scorsese’s scandalous use of New York-American speech in The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) prefigured Coppola’s modernisation of French aristocratic manners and language in Marie Antoinette. The response to Scorsese’s rewriting of biblical history may have been more extreme, but Coppola’s use of travesty in her biopic has contributed to dividing critical opinion.

Travesty, a common device in theatre and literature, irreverently wrests its source material from its historical context, producing blatantly fake fabrications that challenge accepted notions of authenticity and value. It brazenly mixes high and low culture, and does not disguise its impulse to sweep away tradition. In the case of historical fictions, travesty collapses boundaries of time and place through pastiche, emphasising that history is in the eye of the beholder, whether group or individual. Travesty is playful, but it can have a serious purpose: to demonstrate that the past is always viewed through the filter of the present, and represents the vested interests of those who reinvent it. Precedents for historical travesty in cinema range from 1940s Gainsborough costume melodramas to Baz Luhrmann’s ‘Red Curtain’ trilogy (Strictly Ballroom, Romeo+ Juliet, Moulin Rouge); they are often regarded with suspicion by critics who object to the liberties taken and are embarrassed by the disregard for hallowed values.

One of the key vehicles for travesty and pastiche is fashion, which plunders the style archives to create new combinations of past and present. Fashion consciously disrespects boundaries of time, place and culture, yet as every costume historian knows, it is intimately tied to history, not only in its source materials but in its capturing of the spirit of the contemporary moment and its relationship to the past. Fashion engages in a dialogue with history; at its most adventurous and provocative, it achieves the status of both graphic and performance art – witness the iconoclasm of, say, Vivienne Westwood or Jean Paul Gaultier, who have used fashion to make personal statements about their life and times.

Fashion’s restless search for new ideas and forms, plus its association with commodity fetishism, make it both compelling and alienating: its potential as art is often subsumed by its elitism, the availability of designer labels to a limited group of wealthy consumers who wear them to display status. In the past fashion was used to control social boundaries through sumptuary laws that dictated what could be worn by whom. With the advent of mass production, these legal strictures were transformed into unconscious rules. Fashion plays with and breaks these unconscious rules, rendering them visible. In these more democratic times, it is open to anyone to reinterpret them and make their own fashion statements – as with the subcultural styles of the punks or New Romantics, whose strident music sets an assertively modem tone for Marie Antoinette.

The spirit of fashion as creative reinvention, performance and personal style statement informs Coppola’s movie, where costume and set design are used in various ways: to capture the essence of the period, to suggest mood, to reinforce and comment on character, to project the state of mind of its heroine, and to visualise the director’s concerns. The young Austrian archduchess who married into the French royal family in the years leading up to the revolution and was beheaded at the height of the Reign of Terror is often remembered for her apparent disregard for the suffering of her starving subjects, encapsulated in her notorious remark, “Let them eat cake.” Marie Antoinette has always been the focus of extremes of hostility and sympathy, though even sympathisers find it difficult to come to terms with her lack of interest in the world outside Versailles and her frivolous lifestyle.

Coppola has based her film on the 2001 biography Marie Antoinette: The Journey by Antonia Fraser, which counters many of the misconceptions surrounding its subject- in particular dispelling forever the myth that she uttered the infamous words with which she is generally identified. Fraser draws a picture of a teenager out of her depth in the French court and its political intrigues, faced with a sexless marriage and under pressure to produce a royal heir, who gradually grew to maturity only to face barbaric retribution at the hands of the revolutionary tribunal. Coppola claims that she was drawn to the idea of Marie Antoinette as a naive and warm-hearted character caught up in circumstances beyond her control. Rather than a sweeping historical epic, she wanted to paint an intimate portrait that gave an impression of the world in which her heroine was cast adrift from the young woman’s own perspective.

While obviously a sympathetic portrayal, Coppola’s film does not entirely let Marie Antoinette (played by Kirsten Dunst) off the hook. Instead it remains true to the contradictions that make her an ambiguous figure. The sequences of her enjoying a chic ‘rustic’ lifestyle at her well-appointed country retreat Le Petit Trianon, or consuming exquisite pastries and buying extravagant designer shoes (some of Manolo Blahnik’s most exotic creations), have an ironic distance that is absent from other scenes. When Marie Antoinette is stripped of her Austrian clothing before entering France, or stands naked and shivering while the pecking order of courtiers who dress her is decided, her vulnerability is palpable.

Similarly, her emotional devastation that her sister-in-law has delivered a child when she and Louis XVI (played by Coppola’s cousin Jason Schwartzman) are unable to conceive, expressed in private away from the prying eyes of the court, is an insight into her gut-wrenching isolation. Coppola’s strategy is to move between exterior observation and interior perception so viewers experience both empathy with and estrangement from her flawed heroine. Although we witness Marie Antoinette’s progress towards maturity, we are not invited to decide whether she is good or bad. Rather, we are encouraged to respond on an emotional level to her situation.

This emotional response is one of the innovative aspects of Coppola’s intuitive and impressionistic approach to history. Her style is fragmented and episodic, privileging symbolic and affective elements of the image such as colour, pictorial design, light and texture. Sometimes she executes a jarring change of mood, as when the shift in public opinion against Marie Antoinette is depicted tabloid-style by slapping slogans such as “Madame Deficit” on a crude, modern representation of her portrait. This refers to the fact that Marie Antoinette’s overspending on clothes and other pleasurable pursuits was blamed for France’s financial crisis – though as the film suggests, the insistence of Louis XVI’s advisers that money should be sent to support the revolutionaries’ cause in the American War of lndependence was equally responsible.

In a fleeting scene, Marie Antoinette is shown responding to a warning from her mentor Ambassadeur Mercy (Steve Coogan) that she cannot afford her extravagant plans for the palace garden by accepting economies. Coppola takes the fragments of historical record and uses a collage technique to bring into conflict the diverse aspects of the way history has viewed her subject. This is a creative activity rather than the exposition typical of more conventional histories, and while it may not offer viewers much in the way of hard evidence, it does say something about the selective nature of the process of historical reconstruction.

To reinforce this idea, Coppola plays off authenticity and historical document against inventive remixing. Marie Antoinette was shot on location at the Chateau de Versailles, where the crew was allowed unprecedented access to rooms including the grand Hall of Mirrors and Marie Antoinette’s bedroom. The lavish palace and gardens, capable of housing 20,000, were commissioned by Louis XIV, and by the 18th century had become hugely expensive to maintain – one of the problems facing Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.

Production designer K.K. Barrett (who also designed Lost in Translation) embellished the place with furniture, food and draperies that respect the original settings while reinterpreting them, bringing ostentation and conspicuous consumption to the fore and instilling a bright, youthful whimsicality. The resulting visual overload is both seductive and decadent, invoking Marie Antoinette’s candy-coloured perspective while at the same time commenting on her addiction to taste and fashion.

Costume designer Milena Canonero is similarly inventive, giving Marie Antoinette’s status as an 18th-century style icon a contemporary twist by simplifying her outrageous dresses and hairstyles (the young dauphine’s ‘big hair’ became her trademark) without losing their original value as culture-shock. For Coppola, Marie Antoinette was like a caged bird who found her escape from suffocating court etiquette, gossip and the glare of publicity by forging a personal style and identity through her clothes, designs for the palace and her private retreat, and a sophisticated lifestyle (including an interest in music and theatre). Her fascination with fashion was related to performance, and she installed a private theatre at Le Petit Trianon where she enacted scenes from the latest plays (theatre, like cinema today, was a major influence on fashion). Unfortunately, this creative endeavour also brought about her downfall, turning public opinion against her as republican fervour quickened.

Coppola’s film shows Marie Antoinette as essentially misunderstood. Her apparent superficiality and lack of knowledge of political issues were fostered by her indulgent husband, who encouraged her interest in more frivolous pursuits, including gambling parties and masked balls, which fed rumours of her infidelity and became the subject of vitriolic anti-royalist pornographic cartoons. But Coppola is not primarily concerned with setting the historical record straight. There are unmistakable parallels between the director’s experiences as a celebrity member of one of Hollywood’s royal families and Marie Antoinette’s situation as a target for xenophobia, malice and envy in pre-revolutionary France.

Like Marie Antoinette, Coppola is not much interested in the political events that engulfed her heroine, which take place off-screen. She finishes the film with the flight of the king and queen from Versailles to Paris, before the darker days of their trial and beheading. During this later period Marie Antoinette gained political skills and kudos as she attempted to negotiate their release. In Coppola’s film, her growth to maturity is encapsulated in an apocryphal moment, as she faces the angry crowd of peasants from the palace balcony and bows before them. It is a theatrical scene that Dunst plays to the hilt; reputedly Marie Antoinette’s courage was admired by even the most ardent revolutionaries present. For Coppola, the confrontation provides an opportunity for Marie Antoinette to utilise her love of drama and performance.

Other matters of historical debate are dealt with in summary fashion. The reasons for Louis XVI’s impotence are not clear, though it is thought that an operation eventually solved the problem and made it possible for the couple to conceive. In the film, Marie Antoinette’s brother Joseph II (Danny Huston) manages to arouse the dauphin’s libido by likening sexual intercourse to finding the right key to a lock, drawing his metaphor from one of Louis’ favourite hobbies. Marie Antoinette’s flirtation with the Swedish playboy Count Axel von Fersen (Jamie Doman), the subject of gossip and speculation but never verified, is presented in a teasing montage as a full-blown affair. One major episode, ‘The Affair of the Necklace’, the subject of a 2001 film starring Hilary Swank, is omitted completely, despite the fact that it played a large part in swaying public opinion against the queen.

Such insouciance, together with a nonchalant approach to period trappings in design, performance and soundtrack, may antagonise those who demand more substance to history. In Coppola’s film, style is substance, a gesture that is entirely appropriate to her project and to the statement she wants to make. The combination of effortless artistry, quirky humour, cool charisma and hip lifestyle is essential to her creative persona, which has been achieved at some personal cost. Her in-crowd, pop-culture aura is reminiscent in some ways of Andy Warhol (another shoe fetishist). It is, then, no surprise to learn that during the shooting of The Cotton Club (1984), a precocious Sofia Coppola, aged 11, would sit on Warhol’s knee at the Sherry-Netherland hotel on Fifth Avenue engaged in serious conversation about art.