We watched Sofia Coppola’s feature Marie Antoinette (2006) this weekend. Goodness knows what inspired the daughter of Francis Ford Coppola to make a film about how hard it is being the offspring of a great emperor.
The costumes are doing the heavy lifting here, supported by some great hair and the easy charisma of Kirsten Dunst. The eclectic soundtrack certainly catches your attention, but also underlines that incongruous music programming isn’t as easy as Stanley Kubrick makes it look. (I bet Sofia Coppola met Kubrick when she was a girl, didn’t she? According to John Baxter’s biography he approached Francis Ford Coppola about funding A Clockwork Orange.)
But if there’s one big problem the film suffers from I’d call it The Suspended Plot Point.
If you play guitar or piano you’ll know the power of the suspended chord. That sus4 that hangs in the air begging to be resolved. The chord naturally makes you will it to move on, begging to turn into a triad. It’s a well used, simple musical trick. But if you play the same chord in the same song for fifty five minutes, even if the drums and the bass are still hammering along, people might be inclined to press skip.
For more or less the whole middle hour of Marie Antoinette, the story teeters on the issue of when and whether her husband Louis-Auguste will consummate their marriage and seed her with an heir to the throne of France. They aren’t doing it, and they continue not doing it for a long, long time. We get the same urgent encouragement from Marie Antoinette’s counsel, the same plaintive letters from her mother, the same pained expressions from the Countess of Noailles again and again and again, and still, nothing happens. The whole film rides on this plot point for a very long time, and while such a device doesn’t have to bring the whole film to a stop, here it does. Character development, sub plots, they all just feel like they go into a holding pattern while we repeat the gags and enjoy looking at shoes. Eventually Louis-Auguste gets a quick sex-ed lesson and things get going again, but that feels like it leaves half an hour of the film to get the rest of the story done.
Sometimes characters can feel like they’re stuck. It’s a part of life. But that doesn’t have to mean the audience needs to do the same.