May 25, 2006
nights are warm and the days are young
Two things give us hopes for the forthcoming cinematic fete d'Antoinette. Firstly, the beloved Paper of Record has taken the lead in reading the film as, shock, a psychocryptoautobio(aquadooloop) of director Sofia Coppola. Here's Manohla Dargis:
Although early scenes of Marie Antoinette submitting to protocol — if she wants a glass of water, one servant announces her request and another fulfills it — do make her point, it soon becomes clear that the director is herself bewitched by these rituals, which she repeats again and again. The princess lived in a bubble, and it's from inside that bubble Ms. Coppola tells her story.
And then, via disingenuous averral, A. O Scott:
My earlier description of the courts of Louis XV and XVI could just as easily apply to 21st-century Hollywood, a parallel that, in "Marie Antoinette," is both transparent and subtle....It almost goes without saying that Ms. Coppola, daughter of Francis, is herself a child of Hollywood (as is Jason Schwartzman, her cousin). This is not to suggest that the film is veiled autobiography, but rather to speculate about why a movie about a long-dead historical figure should feel so personal, so genuine, so knowing.
The device of reading films as veiled auteurist memoirs is the result of a critical industry that has neither the time nor audience to favor engaging with the film in the way serious criticism might (that is, by assaying its own terms). Such an analytic can, true, offer up insights neither more nor less negligible than the movie in question, especially for the critic who understands that the box office star far more than the director has a determinate effect on a Hollywood film's final shape (there's really no way, e.g., to read Vanilla Sky as being about anything, unless it's about Tom Cruise's dotage/fading bankability).
However, for all its general inevitability, such a hurried and reductive strategy has specific histories. All too often it seems pointedly paternalistic. This isn't the first time Sofia Coppola has been subjected to such dross; witness the cheap criticisms of Lost In Translation, which brutally misrecognized the lead characters' orientalisms as the director's racism, rather than as a basic centerpiece of the film's characterizations (for a more complete account of this critical failing in the context of globalized Hollywood, you can download the essay "Another Green World"). The assumption is that the director finally has nothing to draw on but unexamined prejudices and personal life, and that these things moreover speak unconsciously through her, as she lacks the vision to modulate them. This may be true — but can one imagine the Times (or most any other site of reputedly sincere popular criticism) suggesting such a thing about Ang Lee, Clint Eastwood, or Bryan Singer?
All of which is to say: if that's the sharpest analysis my colleagues at La Dame Grise can conjure, one can be confident that there's more going on. Moreover, the second reason for our hope is that, in its strategy of setting a costume drama to contemporary pop music, and even staging a courtly dance to "I Want Candy," the film sounds like nothing so much as A Knight's Tale, a genially goofy film which among its delights features Paul Bettany as naked Geoff Chaucer, and a courtly dance that starts with nothing but a rhythm, footstomps, clanking (shades of Bresson's Lancelot), a spectral melody...all swelling into a choreographed pavane to Bowie's "Golden Years" — one of the most startling, pleasing moments of film this millennium, a true conjuration.
Posted by jane at May 25, 2006 08:46 AM | TrackBack