History in the Wrong Key
A period film can make the past look reassuringly distant. Its clothes tell us that these people belong to another world, and its music can help keep them there. The distance becomes a kind of protection: we can admire the surfaces without feeling that their desires have much to do with ours.
Sofia Coppola interrupts that arrangement in Marie Antoinette (2006). Eighteenth-century court life appears alongside modern popular music, while Kirsten Dunst's performance keeps the queen's youth and uncertainty close to the surface. Milena Canonero's costumes help construct a world in which elaborate appearance is both a source of pleasure and a public requirement. [1][2]
The anachronism is conspicuous enough to raise a useful question. Why should one kind of invented soundtrack feel historically respectful while another feels like an intrusion? Neither gives us unmediated access to a vanished person's inner life. Both establish a relationship between the period represented and the audience doing the watching.
Modern music changes the terms of that relationship. A sequence of consumption can acquire the momentum of a familiar night out. The attraction of new clothes becomes easier to recognize before we have settled into the comfortable role of judging someone else's extravagance.
That recognition can be illuminating. It can also narrow the view. Understanding the loneliness of a privileged person does not explain the institution that grants her privilege. A film can bring us close to an individual's discomfort while keeping the broader consequences of her position farther away.
I think the film becomes most interesting at that point of friction. Its beauty makes it possible to feel the seduction of the court's world, including the ways appearance offers an outlet within it. The same beauty can make it difficult to look beyond the people whose feelings receive the most careful lighting.
Coppola described her approach as an impressionistic telling from Marie Antoinette's point of view, rather than a comprehensive historical epic. [2] Taking that intention seriously means recognizing both what the perspective reveals and what it cannot encompass.
An intimate portrait does not become a complete history because it is emotionally persuasive. Nor does its selectivity make every feeling it presents irrelevant. The task for a viewer is to resist turning sympathy into a verdict.
Costume sharpens the problem. A dress can be a personal experiment for its wearer and a sign of social distance to someone watching from outside the palace. Those meanings can coexist. The garment does not have to choose between them, even when the camera encourages our attention to settle on one.
The film's deliberately wrong musical key reminds us that historical representation is being composed in the present. What feels immediate has been made immediate. What remains distant has also been placed there through decisions about attention.
I find that more useful than asking whether the film simply makes its subject likable. The harder question is what our liking permits us to overlook. The pleasure of entering this beautiful world becomes more demanding when we keep noticing its boundaries, especially the people and pressures that its most intimate rooms cannot contain.
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