Frivolity and superficiality are not fair charges to lay against Sophie Coppola’s Marie Antoinette; rather, the charge lays in how those aspects are used. More than anything else, it is that kind of lifestyle–one embracing effervescent, ephemeral surface pleasures—that allows the teenage Marie-Antoinette (Kirsten Dunst) to escape the loneliness of her new surroundings; so the delight the film takes in those same pleasures is mostly a measure of sympathy for the young girl. Married off by her mother, the Queen of Austria, to the dauphin of France (Jason Schwartzman) at a mere 15-years old, and immediately pressured from all sides—from the gossips in the court to cold admonitions from her mother—to bear an heir, Marie-Antoinette as a protagonist joins Charlotte from Lost in Translation (and perhaps the Lisbon girls from The Virgin Suicides) as a young, female subject alienated by an exclusive social world. While the stifling protocol and severe isolation of Versailles may seem stricter than the more contemporary contexts Coppola has filmed in the past, the vast leap upwards in social milieu affords the dispirited young protagonist more opulent escapes. Marie-Antoinette luckily has the resources to indulge herself in a myriad of momentary pleasures, and eventually her distractions grow to resemble less a cover for her discontent than they do passions or, even worse, habits: gambling, shopping, eating, drinking, parties, and even a love affair.

To the degree that Marie-Antoinette partakes in these pleasures, Coppola’s film is likewise taken by this highly aesthetic lifestyle. Filmed on location at Versailles, the film puts maximum effort into exuberant period detail and bricolage—bursting inside the formality of the royal palace architecture is wallpapers, dresses, and décor that are all painstakingly ornate, patterned, colored and fashioned in a style that could be described as “monotonous variety”—and minimizes full-bodied storytelling and character portrayal. As such, the film is crucially less about how Marie-Antoinette lived her life as French royalty, than it is about how her life looked as she lived it. Note, significantly, that this does not mean how it felt to live such a life. For a film that so enjoys the splendors of the façade that is most of Marie-Antoinette’s life it puts tragically little effort into communicating either her stifled sadness or her exhilarated pleasures. This lacking human layer results mainly because the film moves at a very breezy, day-dreamy pace, basking for moments only in the visual details of a scene and generally suppressing a sense that there are the textures of depth in the story, the characters, or the themes. It does not help that Coppola has cast Kirsten Dunst. In speaking of Dunst in the role, it must first be said it is immensely and rarely gratifying to see a filmmaker devote so much attention to the face, person, and presence of a single female protagonist, calling to mind a kind of devotion of filmmaking and of narrative more common to classical Hollywood than in these days where female stardom has long-waned. Unfortunately, Dunst here is fairly limited to a look of benign, hopeful openness and sympathy, with occasional bouts of glee and distress, depending on Coppola’s emotional need for a scene. The actress carries the young girl through most of her life with this I-just-want-to-help look on her face, which, like much of the film’s aesthetic, works initially, forms a bright impression, but fails to elicit any deeper suggestions long before the movie draws to a close.

This superficiality of Marie Antoinette, of course, is to some degree taking the lifestyle of Marie-Antoinette and applying it to the form and structure of the film. But, on the one hand, inside the film this suppression inexplicably curtails what is seemingly important for the young woman: a brief love affair with a Swedish officer, the death of a child (communicated with uncharacteristic coldness through the altering of a family portrait), the friends she eventually makes in her retinue, and her eventual attachment to the sexually and emotionally distant king. And, jumping outside the film but following the same line of reasoning for the film’s structure and style, the subsequent question begs to be asked: If Marie-Antoinette as a character covers up her discontent and unhappiness by living a life full of superficial indulgences, what is Marie Antoinette the film covering for? It is indeed difficult to explore the film as contemporarily allegorical because of the age and gender of the protagonist, but of course there is the implicit theme that the world is collapsing around the leaders (or perhaps one could rephrase and say “celebrities”) of the most powerful Continental nation, and they consciously make sure to see or hear little evidence of it until it is far too late, inundating themselves in rituals and sensual pleasures. In fact, Marie-Antoinette’s somewhat self-imposed and somewhat imposed-on blindness as a character is one of the stronger rationales for the film’s all-over thinness. At a masked ball, the young princess wears a mask that looks more like a blindfold, and it turns out that people can recognize her despite the disguise; the allusion is clear, that Marie-Antoinette is open to scrutiny and judgment, but she herself sees little of what is around her. She is a bit dumb, a lot sad, very young, and even more sequestered—yet for all the film’s sympathy for the young queen, Coppola’s decision to limit the film this way may, in the end, by more of a condemnation, in a broader sense, than Marie Antoinette’s initial sense of understanding suggests.

The potential for the edgier, meatier, and more potently revisionist period film that Marie Antoinette could be, while clear from the spunky and successful use of 1980s pop music, is even more evident in Coppola’s inspired casting. Schwartzman’s meek goof of a king, Rip Torn’s gruff and crude Louis XV, Asia Argento’s turn as his vamping mistress, and Molly Shannon as a court gossip all point to an attempt at a broad, contemporary colloquialness, emphasizing off-kilter caricatures and an inspired slyness of the adaptation. This is also visible in many of the movie’s throwaway dialog scenes, which generally and pleasurably take up the bulk of the screenplay, and which often sound more like modern day effluvial chitchat rather than arch-period court-speak. However, the success of the film’s anachronistic edge subtly undercuts Marie-Antoinette’s sadness, as well as her rather blandly pretty pleasures. This broad style, connected as it is to Marie-Antoinette’s teenage subjectivity, seems to pose the film as an impressionistic, experiential work, steeped in what it feels like to be Marie-Antoinette. But, as suggested earlier, the film is neither subtle nor full enough to explore the destabilized subjectivity of its teenage protagonist. Two long shots of Dunst weeping (markedly staged both reflexively and suggestively tightly against the walls of her rooms) and a handful of moments alone within the monumental Versailles architecture are the grandest expressions that the film gives Marie-Antoinette’s unhappiness. More successful is the middle of film, where the queen retreats to a small “country” chateau, and tries to escape the court routine by embracing the casualness of nature. This is humorously undercut by the fake little village the queen has constructed on her grounds that simulates what it is like to live the simple country life. Taken bit by bit, these brief, montaged and elliptical scenes of nature reveling, pensive unhappiness, or late-night partying express a simple naivety suggestive of the teenage heroine. But in the end these collections of impressionistic moments are not rich enough to fully humanize her indulgences, rationalize the film’s admittedly admirable sympathy for her, or produce a re-take on Marie-Antoinette’s story as any different from her mythic stereotype as embodying all that was wrong with pre-Revolutionary French aristocracy.